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THE WAYS OF THE GODS 



The Ways of the Gods 



by 



Algernon Sidney Crapsey 

Author of "Religion and Politics," 

"The Rise of The Working Class," 

and other books. 




THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS 

150 Lafayette Street, New York 

MCMXXI 






Copyright, T02T, 

by A. S. Crapsey 

New York 

All rights of translation reserved 



Second Edition 



FEB 23 1922 
©CI.A653998 

<Vv0 J 



TO 
THE MEMORY OF 

ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

SCHOLAR AND POET 

Who, being dead, yet speaketh 

NIGHT WINDS 

The old, 

Old winds that blew, 

When chaos was, what do 

They tell the clattered trees that I 

Should weep? 



ROMA JETERNA 

The sun 

Is warm to-day, 

O Romulus, and on 

Thine olden Palatine the bird* 

Still sing. 



THE GRAND CANYON 

By Zeus! 

Shout word of this 

To the eldest dead! Titans, 

Gods, Heroes, come who have once more 

A home! 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The Author in sending this book to press does so with a 
deep sense of obligation to Dr. Nathaniel Schmidt, Professor 
of Semitic Languages at Cornell University, for his careful 
and corrective reading of the manuscript, which is greatly 
improved by his critical chastisement. This labor of love 
does not, however, involve his learned friend in any respon- 
sibility as to the accuracy or sanity of his book. That 
responsibility belongs to the writer alone. 

As the book is not an abstract treatise in theology, philos- 
ophy, or history, but is rather a relation of the Author's per- 
sonal intellectual and religious experiences, he (for greater 
simplicity and directness) when speaking of himself has used 
the personal pronoun I. 



ADVICE TO READER 

Read one chapter at a sitting, preferably aloud, and so taste the 
language; when you have in this way finished a book, then re-read 
that book, silently, with the mind and so master the thought; when 
you have in this manner gone through the volume then re-read as a 
whole and so make the book your own. 



Vll 



NOTE TO SECOND PRINTING. 

The author takes advantage of this second issue of his book 
to express his high appreciation of the reception of his work 
by the Press of the country. He is especially indebted to Mr. 
Coblentz of The New York Herald and to Mr. Gore of The 
Detroit News for the full and lucid presentation of the nature 
and purpose of the Ways of the Gods to their readers. He 
wishes especially to acknowledge his obligation to Professor 
D. S. Muzzey of Columbia University for calling atten- 
tion, in his exhaustive and illuminating review published in 
the November Standard, to certain errors which have escaped 
the eyes of the various readers of manuscripts and proof 
sheets. These errors were made known after the printing 
of the pages of the present issue. 

In one of these errors the author has confused the number 
of the year with that of the century. On page 374 the date 
should be 1304 instead of 1404. On page 316 the date of the 
fall of Constantinople should be 1453 instead of 1483. In giv- 
ing on page 271 the year 476 as the time when the Roman 
empire ceased to exist, the author had in mind the empire 
of the West of which Rome was the capital, not the empire 
of the East of which Constantinople was the seat of gov- 
ernment. As the book clearly sets forth the Eastern Empire, 
which was in reality not Roman but Byzantine, lingered on 
in shameful existence for a thousand years when it, in turn, 
ceased to exist with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. 

Other errors to which the Professor calls attention, if they 
be errors, are errors of judgment and not of fact. Of such the 
critic is kind enough to say that they are slight blemishes, in 
no way affecting the general accuracy and value of the book. 
No author could wish for a kinder fate than to come under the 
knife of the learned, genial, kindly, just Professor Muzzey. 

The critic in The Nation charges that the author has not 
quite established his theses. He says, Symbolize your God if 
you will b\ an algebraic formula in which economic conditions 
are fully represented, there will always remain in your formula 
the unknown quantity X. The author is indebted to his critic 



for giving him the opportunity of making clear that the prin- 
ciple of economic determinism does not and cannot account for 
the Divine Principle, but only for its manifestations. It does 
not pretend to eliminate the unknown X, but only to tell how 
the unknown X has been transformed into known Xes by the 
various generations of men. 

To the reader who doubted the statement that there are 
eleven thousand rooms in the Vatican, the author has to say that 
his doubt is well founded. Eleven thousand seems to be a 
popular phrase in Italy and other Catholic countries for a large 
but indefinite number — as for instance the Eleven Thousand 
Martyred Virgins. — The author does not know how many 
rooms there are in the Vatican, nor how many martyred 
virgins there were; but he knows that in either case there 
were what "Lo the poor Indian" would call a heap rooms — 
a heap virgins. 

The author is far from claiming infallibility or finality for 
his book. All that he has claimed or tried to do is to give his 
readers a clue by which they can find their way through the 
mazes of the religious history of the Western World. 

The Author. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

Author's Note xi 

Proem xiii 

Book I. The Gods of the House xix 

I The Gods of the House i 

TI The Manes ■ 5 

III The Lares 10 

IV The Penates 16 

V New Gods for Old 19 

Book II. Gods of the Greek Dynasty 23 

VI The God of Space 25 

VII The God of Time 31 

VIII The City God 35 

IX The Gods of the Leisure Class 40 

X The Twofold Destiny of Zeus "45 

XI Athena : Goddess of the Implicit Reason 49 

XII Phoebus Apollo: The God of the Explicit Reason.. 54 

XIII Aphrodite : Goddess of Desire 59 

XIV Ares : The God of War 65 

XV Demeter : The Mother of Sorrows 68 

XVI Hades : God of the Dead 73 

XVII Dionysus : God of Madness 77 

XVIII The Fall of the Greek Dynasty 81 

Book III. The Roman God 85 

XIX Divus Cesar : God of the Organization 87 

Book IV. The Hebrew Gods 95 

XX Rise of the Semitic Dynasty 97 

XXI The War God of Bene-Israel 104 

XXII Jehovah : The Friend God of Abraham 108 

XXIII The Bargain God of Jacob 112 

XXIV The God of the Working Class 117 



x CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

XXV The Tent God of Bene-Israel 123 

XXVI Jehovah the Righteous 128 

XXVII The God of the Temple, Jehovah the Holy 134 

XXVIII The God of the Book 139 

XXIX The God of Inspiration 144 

XXX Jehovah : Creator of Heaven and Earth 150 

Book V. The Degradation of the Gods 155 

XXXI The Degradation of the Gods i57 

Book VI. The God Christus 165 

XXXII A New God Comes to Rome 167 

XXXIII Jesus and the Resurrection 172 

XXXIV The Magdalene Tradition 175 

XXXV The Petrine Tradition 181 

XXXVI The Character of Peter 182 

XXXVII Peter Proclaimed Jesus Messiah 184 

XXXVIII Peter Denies Jesus 187 

XXXIX Peter's Flight in Despair 189 

XL Peter's Return in Joy 191 

XLI Psychic Projection 192 

XLII The Resurrection of the Dead 194 

XLIII Christus, the War God of the Spiritual Israel 198 

XLIV Christus, the Tent God of the Spiritual Israel 202 

XLV Christus, the Son of Jehovah the Rtghteous 208 

XLVI Christus, the Son of the Holy One of Israel ...... 213 

XLVII The Worship of Christus in the Primitive Church 218 

Book VII. The Gods of the Greek Dialectic 225 

XLVIII The Gods of the Greek Dialetic 227 

XLIX The Coming of the Absolute 230 

L Christus, the Son of the Absolute 237 

LI The Divine Personality of Christus, Son of the 

Absolute 242 

Book VIII. Gods of the Latin Lawyers 249 

LII The Celestial Cesar 251 

LIII God Almighty: Creator of Heaven and Hell 256 

LIV The Wrath of God 263 



Chapter 

LV 

LVI 

LVII 

LVIII 

LIX 



LX 
LXI 

LXII 

LXIII 

LXIV 

LXV 

LXVI 

LXVII 

LXVIII 

LXIX 

LXX 



CONTENTS xi 

Page 

Book IX. The Medieval Gods 269 

The Eclipse of Christus 271 

Mary : the Goddess of Consolation 278 

The Exploitation of the Gods 285 

Joseph Comes to his Own 291 

The Gods Break Loose 296 

Book X. Gods of the Modern World 303 

The Disruption of Protestantism 305 

The Crystallization of Catholicism 311 

The Return of Pan 316 

The Vision of the Infinite 318 

The Vision of the Eternal 323 

The Making of Man 326 

The God of the Machine 332 

The God of the Market 339 

The God Humanus 349 

The Service of God 359 

The Day of Judgment 368 



PROEM 

It came to pass many years ago that, in the course of 
my travels in Italy, I chanced to be in the City of Flor- 
ence of a Sunday. I rose betimes in the morning and made 
my way to the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, that I might 
join with the people of the city in their customary acts 
of worship, and at the same time steep my soul in the mem- 
ories of Savonarola. 

When I reached the Piazza del Duomo the day was dawn- 
ing. That, to me, most wonderful of city squares was con- 
secrated by the morning light. The great cathedral, with 
its blocks of alternate black and white marble, was unlike 
any other church I had seen in the world. Embodying the 
combined genius of Arnolfo di Cambio of the thirteenth 
century, and of Brunelleschi, of the fifteenth, its history was 
the story of the transition from Gothic architecture to that 
of the Renaissance. Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo 
in Florence inspired Michselangelo to hang in the sky of 
Rome the more wonderful dome of St. Peter's. 

But while I reverenced the sublimity of the Duomo and 
greatly admired the Baptistery, with its bronze doors by 
Ghiberti, I fell in love at first sight with the Campanile of 
Giotto. This dream of form and color, seen for the first time 
in the holy hour of dawn, inspired my soul with sensations 
of delight that were painful in their intensity. As I stood 
in silent worship before this product of human genius, it 
seemed to me a thing of life. It was the soul of the artist 
immortalized, — Giotto existent in his work ! So lost was I 
in admiration of this bell-tower that I forgot for the time 
why it was that I had come to the Piazza del Duomo at this 
early hour in the morning. 

I was reminded of my purpose by the chiming of the bells 
calling the people to worship. 

xiii 



xiv PROEM 

When I entered the interior of the Cathedral it was dark 
and empty. I stood for some moments in that gloomy void 
and peopled it with sharp-faced Florentines, who crowded its 
floor space and climbed into its window niches, on such a 
morning as this in the year of the plague, 1497, to listen to 
the preaching of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of the Order of 
St. Dominic, — at that time the ruler of Florence. How quiet 
was this house of God on the day of my visitation in contrast 
with the stress and the storm of those ages of Faith ! — Then 
the God of this church was alive, and the voice of His prophet 
was heard in His house. Now the God of this Church was 
a-dying, His house was forsaken, and His prophets were silent. 
There was no open vision. 

As I walked through the wide spaces of the Cathedral 
I saw little clusters of people, mostly women, kneeling at the 
various side altars where priests were celebrating the mys- 
teries of the church. One of these altars seemed more 
popular than the others ; it attracted a larger number of wor- 
shippers, many of whom were men. Being of a democratic 
turn of mind, with a desire to belong, if possible, to the 
majority, I joined myself to this greater company. 

At first I thought it was the priest who gave interest to 
this altar. He was an aged man of benign countenance, who, 
having spent his days in prayer and meditation, radiated 
holiness, blessing all who came within the sphere of his 
influence. But on looking from the face of the priest to the 
face of the altar I found another, and to my mind, a more 
cogent reason why this altar was more popular with the 
people, and especially with men, than any other altar in the 
Cathedral. My eyes, lifted to the fagade of the baldachin over 
the altar, read in letters of gold the words: "Ite ad Ioseph;" 
and on reflection I concluded that it was not the priest but 
the divinity that gave popularity to this shrine. For of all 
the divinities whose altars to-day crowd the Catholic churches 
of Europe, none is more popular than St. Joseph. 

As I knelt before this altar in the Duomo of Florence, I 
recalled that in other churches in Europe I had seen the same 



PROEM xv 

evidence of this saint's favor with the people that greeted me 
here. As, for instance, in the Church of Saint Roche in Paris, 
the most fashionable and active of all the churches in that 
city, the Chapel of St. Joseph was more rich in votive tablets 
than any other chapel in the church, not even excepting that 
of the Blessed Virgin. On these votive tablets the powers 
of God, in all their fulness, were ascribed to St. Joseph. One 
tablet thanks St. Joseph for saving the giver from ship- 
wreck, another for the delivering from sickness; a mother is 
thankful to Joseph for raising her daughter from the bed of 
death ; a father for bringing his son home from the wars. 
Whatever a people might expect from its God that, accord- 
ing to votive tablets in his chapel in the Church of Saint 
Roche, the people of Paris had received from St. Joseph. 

When Mass was celebrated in St. Joseph's chapel, the other 
chapels seemed deserted in comparison. Mary, his betrothed 
wife, did not seem to be so sought after as was he. When 
there was a drought the people prayed to Joseph for rain ; 
when there was a flood the people called on Joseph for fair 
weather ; to all intents and purposes Joseph is to-day the 
active God of the common people in Northern Catholic coun- 
tries ; he has relieved the other gods of the necessity of listen- 
ing to the prayers and attending to the wants of the man 
of the street and +he woman of the house. 

This popularity of Joseph is of comparatively recent origin ; 
it is only since the Reformation that his festivals have been 
festivals of the first class, and only in our own times that 
his cult has reached its present dimensions, so as to rival, if 
not obscure, the cult of the Virgin. 

As I came out of the dim religious light of the Cathedral 
into the open day of the street my mind was busy with the 
problem of this popularity of Joseph. For I perceived that 
this fact was not isolated, but was related to the general 
religious history of the human race. The experience of 
Joseph was the experience of all the gods : in favor to-day, 
neglected to-morrow. One god going, another god coming. 



xvi PKOEM 

The spiritual history of the race is nothing else than the 
history of this passing of the gods. Everywhere are forsaken 
temples and broken altars. Fanes once famous and the resort 
of millions are now buried under tons of earth, being brought 
to our knowledge by the labors of the antiquarian, while the 
names of the gods who once dwelt in those temples, long 
forgotten, are now slowly deciphered by the painstaking 
scholar. 

As I dwelt on these things I could not but wonder at 
this passing of the gods: "Is it," I asked myself, "the fickle- 
ness of man that is the cause of this strange phenomenon, 
— that we change the fashion of our gods as we change the 
fashion of our garments, putting them on and off as the 
whim takes us, — or is there some deep underlying reason 
compelling this change? Are both men and gods creatures 
of a Fate that gives to each his day and when his day is done 
bids him depart? 

With this thought in mind I began to read once more the 
history of the gods, hoping to find in that history the clew 
to this mystery. I was not disappointed. 

I found, — or, at least, I think I found, — a necessary rela- 
tion between the life of a god and the life of his people. The 
god of a given people is the embodiment of the economic 
conditions of that people, and the economic conditions de- 
termine the social and political institutions of a people. 
Hence it is that under certain economic conditions, with 
their attendant social and political institutions, a given god 
has sway over the religious life of a people. When these 
economic conditions change, this god disappears, and a new 
god takes his place. This principle is most perfectly illus- 
trated in the religious history of the Western world, where 
the gods have followed one another in an orderly succession : 
their going and coming determined by the industrial develop- 
ment of the people and the consequent changes in social and 
political organization. 

It is my purpose in the pages that follow to trace this 
history of the gods to its natural causes ; to show why in 



PKOEM xvii 

our day, for instance, the popularity of Joseph is growing, 1 
that of the Virgin declining. In order to do this, it will 
not be necessary to go back to the gods of the period of 
savagery and early barbarism. We can with profit limit our 
investigation to the gods of the Western world in the his- 
toric and the immediately pre-historic periods. After a brief 
account of the domestic gods of the Western people, — the 
Manes, the Lares, and the Penates of the Romans, — we will 
follow the history of the various Greek dynasties, tracing 
them as far as we may to their source in the early life of 
the Aryan people. We will mark the decline of the Greek 
gods before the oncoming gods of Syria and the East, and 
their final overthrow by the god of the Hebrews. We will 
study in turn the transformation of the Hebrew god by 
the Greek Dialectic, the outcome of which was the Christian 
God of the Trinity. We will trace the rise in Christendom 
of the cult of the Virgin and the saints down to our own 
day, when all these gods are in the melting pot, and the 
god of the future is in the process of casting. 



1 "Prior to the 12th century the devotion of Joseph was not 
a public cult. He began then to attract the worship of such 
eminent persons as S. Bernard of Clairvaux, of S. Thomas Aquinas 
and S. Gertrude. In the next age this cult was promoted by men 
zealous for the reformation of the church, among whom were Peter 
d'Ailly and Jehan Gerson. It was only under the pontificate of 
Sixtus XII (1471-84) that S. Joseph was placed on the Calendar of 
the saints and honored with a festival. From that time the devotion 
acquired greater and greater popularity, the dignity of the Feast 
keeping pace with this steady growth. At first only a festum sim- 
plex, it was soon elevated to a double rite by Innocent VIII (1484 
94) and declared by Gregory XV in 1621 a festival of obligation and 
raised to the rank of a double of the second class by Clement XI 
(1700-21). A wonderful and unprecedented increase of popularity 
called for a luster to be added to the cult of the Saint. Accordingly 



xviii PROEM 

one of the first acts of Pius IX, himself singularly devout to St. 
Joseph, was to extend to the whole church the feast of the Patron- 
age (1847) and in December 1870 acceding to the wishes of the 
bishops and all the faithful, Pius IX solemnly declared the Holy 
Patriarch Joseph patron of the Catholic Church and enjoined that 
his feast (19 March) should be celebrated as a double of the first 
class (but without octave on account of Lent)." — The Catholic En- 
cyclopedia, Vol. VIII, pp. 505-6. 

A feast, double, of the first class is the highest honor that can 
be paid to a Catholic divinity, — by this honor Joseph was made 
the equal of Mary, and second only to Jesus. 

The eminent scientist St. George-Mivart, himself a Catholic, saw 
in this growing cult of Joseph a preparation on the part of the Cath- 
olic church for the acknowledgment of the natural paternity of 
Joseph. St. George-Mivart died excommunicate. 



Book 1 i 

THE GODS OF THE HOUSE 



CHAPTER I 
The Gods of the House 

As man emerged from savagery and lower barbarism into 
higher barbarism' and civilization, he changed gradually, — but 
radically, — his method of getting his living. Having in his 
earlier periods domesticated fire and brought under his hand 
the more timid and useful of the animals, he mastered the 
rudiments of agriculture so that it was no longer necessary 
for him to wander far and wide in search of food. He had 
but to settle upon the land, to build him a house, and there 
a man might live year after year, with his wives and his 
children, his men servants and his women servants, his oxen 
and his asses, his horses and his dogs, his cattle and his sheep, 
and so far as his living was concerned, never go beyond the 
confines of his own fields. 

The common labor of his household applied to the land 
gave him and his family an abundant and a constant food 
supply. He harnessed his oxen and his asses to the plow 
and by their strength turned the furrow in the field. His 
horse and his dog were his companions in the hunt, which 
became the amusement of his leisure rather than the business 
of his life. In return for his care and protection, the cattle 
yielded him milk and butter and meat for his table; the sheep 
gave him of its wool for his clothing ; he gathered from his 
fields a harvest of ^heat and lentils and roots ; his hillsides 
were planted with his orchards and vineyards, so that he, 
with his household, could eat and drink and be merry all the 
days of his life. His fields were his wealth, his house was 
his castle, and there the man of the house ruled as the lord 
of the house and the land. 

It was during the later period of barbarism and the earlier 
period of civilization that man became conscious of his pater- 
nity; it was not until he became a farmer that he became, 

1 



2 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

in any true sense of the word, a father. Prior to the institu- 
tion of the family man was simply the male of the species ; 
his relation to the female was instinctive and temporary. 
He was not conscious that his union with her was productive 
of a child ; he did not have for that child responsibility or 
affection. 

In the earliest period of human development the children 
were the children of the mother, not of the father; for that 
was the age of mother-right, — when descent was traced 
through the female line. The male performed his function, 
then went his way and forgot it; the female bore in her 
womb the seed of this encounter, brought it forth in her 
pain, and nursed it at her breast. It was her child, and she 
could never forget it. 

But when man ceased to be a wanderer, settled upon his 
land, and lived year by year in close intimacy with his 
woman, he became gradually conscious that her children were 
also his children, and the mysterious process of reproduction 
engaged his attention and stirred in his soul feelings that 
found expression in the religion of the house, than which 
no religion has been more enduring, or has influenced more 
powerfully the history of mankind. The religion of the 
house was the binding force of the family ; and the family 
is that institution by means of which man passed from sav- 
agery and lower barbarism into higher barbarism and civil- 
ization. 

The family, in its nearer perfect form, is the achievement 
of the Aryan race ; and largely because of the creation of 
this institution the Aryan race has the leadership of the 
world. In the family the Aryan evolved an economic institu- 
tion that gave him mastery over his food supply, which 
developed his social instincts, and in which he exercised the 
powers of government. 

The conscious union of a man and a woman for the pro- 
creation of children was not the cause of the family, it was 
the consequence. Man was conscious of his dog and his 
horse long before he was conscious of his wife, who was 
first his slave and then his consort. The woman had dis- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 3 

covered the uses of fire, had tilled the field, and had tamed 
the animals while man was roving as a warrior and a hunter 
in search of excitement and food. Finding his food no longer 
in the forest, but at the fireside, he settled down, appro- 
priating the woman and her discoveries to his own uses. 

Improving upon the methods of his woman, the man mas- 
tered the art of smelting iron, made a coulter for his plow, 
fashioned an axe, a spade, a shovel, and a hoe; put these in 
the hands of his women and his slaves, and by means of their 
labor, under his directing eye, secured for himself (and, 
incidentally, for his dependents) food and clothing and shelter 
and a place and a name in the earth. 

The man had to defend these his possessions against all 
comers. The land and the women and the children and the 
slaves were organized for defense as much as for production. 
The field was trenched ; the garden was walled ; a watch was 
kept day and night, to guard against the assault of the 
wandering tribes that continually threatened the existence of 
the family. The family was an armed force of which 
the head of the family was the commander, as well as an 
industrial establishment of which he was the superintendent ; 
thus being welded into unity by a common interest and 
a common danger. Obedience to the head of the house was 
a necessity, if the house were to stand. A divided house was 
a fallen house. 

It was under such conditions that the idea of property 
was developed and established its sway over the mind and 
heart of man. The land was his land, the women his women, 
the children his children, the slaves his slaves, the cattle and 
the sheep his cattle and sheep. To extend the area of his 
land, to increase the number of souls under his hand, was 
the consuming ambition of the head of the family. 

Not only did man in evolving the family change his mode 
of living but he modified in the profoundest manner his view 
of life itself. His life was no longer limited by the fact of 
his death ; his ownership did not cease with his decease. 
When he died the landholder did not lose his grip upon 
the land. If he did not any longer dwell on it, he dwelt 



4 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

in it. He had in it his grave, and from his grave he ruled 
the land with a new and mystic power. From being the 
man of the house he became the god of the house. 

Ancestor worship is that form of religion which has pre- 
vailed wherever property in land and the possession of wife 
and children have made of the man a landowner and a house- 
holder. Man under these circumstances extended his per- 
sonality in space over land and in time through his children. 
His desire for land was the outcome of his will to power, 
his desire for children of his will to live. His children, the 
seed of his loins, were his support and defense while on 
the earth, his servants and suppliants while in the earth. 
In the thought of the ancient the death of the father did not 
remove him from the family circle. His tomb was the sacred 
table of the family, his spirit the guardian spirit of the house, 
his worship the unifying principle of the family life. 

As the years went by, and as one after another the heads 
of the family went down into the grave, so did the number 
of the gods of the family increase. Every family was in 
the keeping of a host of divinities who were the guardians 
of its peace and the objects of its worship. To them the 
living head of the family made obeisance as he passed over 
the threshold, to them he made oblation when he sat down 
to meat, for them he kept festival and holy day, and none 
but he and his house could share in the sacred rites of this 
household religion. 

These House Spirits were called by different names in 
different lands, but whatever that name, the conception of 
the gods was the same. By the Greeks they were called 
demons and heroes ; among the Latins they were known 
as the Manes, the Lares, and the Penates. And while these 
divinities had in their keeping the general interests of the 
family and might be called upon for any purpose, yet there 
was among them a sort of rude division of labor, so that each 
class was responsible, in a way, for a given guardianship of 
the family life. The Manes were the keepers of the blood; the 
Lares were the keepers of the gates ; the Penates were the keep- 
ers of the fire and the store. It was the duty of the Manes to 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 5 

preserve the sanctity of the marriage bed, of the Lares to 
secure the integrity of the family estate, and of the Penates 
to keep alive the fires on the hearth and to watch over the 
contents of the cupboard. 



CHAPTER II 
The Manes 

"Nothing," says Dr. Hearn in his interesting and valuable 
'History of the Aryan Household,' "was farther from 
the minds of archaic men than the notion that all men 
were of one blood, and were the creatures of an All-Father 
in Heaven. The universal belief of the early world was 
that men were of different bloods ; that they each had fathers 
of their own ; and that these fathers were not in heaven, but 
beneath in the earth. They had a strong and practical con- 
viction that they lived under a Divine protection; that this 
protection extended to themselves and all the members of 
their household and that its influence, not only did not 
defend but was usually hostile to others. Those others had 
in like manner their own gods, who naturally favored and 
protected them as household gods ought to do. The House 
Father of old cared little whether the universe had one 
author or many authors ; his practical duty, his hopes and 
fears centered upon his own hearth. Profoundly religious, 
indeed he was, but his religion assumed a different form from 
that with which we are familiar. In its origin, its objects 
and its results it was entirely domestic." 1 

The primary concern of the House-Father was the con- 
tinuance of the house. As he could not live forever in the 
house, he must have a son to take his place when he was 
gone. It must be a son and not a daughter ; for in the ancient 
Aryan family the female had no rights of inheritance ; she 

1 "History of the Aryan Household," Wm. Edw. Hearn; Lon- 
don, 1879. 



6 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

could own nothing, not even herself. Until the House- 
Father had provided an heir for his estate he had failed in 
the most signal of his duties. To perform this function prop- 
erly required the careful selection of the woman who was 
to be the mother of his son. With this woman he must 
have exclusive rights of cohabitation. She must be his and 
his only, guarded with jealous care, in order that the man 
might be sure that the child born of this woman was his 
child and so the due and lawful heir to his property and 
his government. 

This necessity on the part of the House Father, to give 
an heir to his house, gave rise to all the sanctities of mar- 
riage and to the enforced chastity of the family woman. The 
ancient Aryan man did not marry, as we say, for love, nor 
yet for companionship ; his marriage was not a pleasure, it 
was a duty ; it was not so much the concern of the man him- 
self as it was the concern of his house. By his marriage 
he could make or mar the fortunes of his house. In his 
wife he must find qualities that would be for the advantage 
of his son who was to be born of her. Her blood must be 
pure (for was it not the blood of his unborn son and heir?) ; 
her family must be equal or superior to her man's, that his 
son might not be ashamed as the child of a low-born woman ; 
her dowry must be rich, in order that the estate of the son 
might be increased by her wealth. The ancient Aryan knew 
nothing about eugenics as a science, but he practiced it most 
sedulously as an art. He did not choose his wife as the 
idle pastime of a summer night, but he selected her with all 
the care with which a racing man chooses a brood-mare for 
his prize stallion. The marriage of the head of the house 
was a religious duty "not to be entered into unadvisedly or 
lightly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in 
the fear of the gods." 2 

Marriage under these conditions was a sacrament. The 
Manes of the House were present at its celebration ; the 
sacred cake was broken and eaten in the presence of the 

2 Marriage Service, English Prayer Book. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 7 

Divinities; the marriage bed was blessed by the Spirits of 
the Fathers, and when the child was conceived it was these 
same gods who gave life to the seed, safety to the womb. 
Children so begotten were not so much the children of the 
individual man and woman as they were the children of the 
house; this was especially true of the first-born son and heir. 
When the woman had given to the house its future lord and 
master she had in that house the place of honor second only 
to that of the House-Father; she became the House-Mother; 
and if not quite the equal of the man, yet first among his 
servants and dependents. The Manes of the House became her 
protectors for life, and her children rose up and called her 
blessed. 

It was this conception of the family as a divine institution 
tracing its descent through a long line of holy ancestors that 
made chastity the cardinal virtue of the family woman. The 
unchaste woman corrupted the blood of the family, broke 
the line of its orderly descent, introduced the child of a 
stranger into the family circle, deprived the House-Father 
of his right to have his own seed succeed him in the house, 
and, — more dreadful still, — this disloyalty of the woman made 
profane the sacred rites of the domestic religion. 

It was intolerable to the Manes of the House, who were 
the keepers of the blood, that the bastard seed of a stranger 
should sit before their sacred fires, break the sacramental 
bread, and pour out the holy oblation. The same feeling 
of horror was excited in the family by the discovery of 
such a profanation of the family altar as would stir the 
heart of a pious Catholic upon learning that the holy bread 
of which he had eaten at the altar had been blessed by 
some intruding, unconsecrated man. There was no punish- 
ment too dire to be visited upon the woman who by her 
unfaithfulness so disgraced her Lord, shamed her children, 
defiled the family blood, and blasphemed the Manes, who 
were the Keepers of the Blood. Such a woman was burned 
with fire, she was stoned with stones, she was whipped naked 
out into the wilds, to be torn and devoured by the beasts. 



8 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

So it came to pass that pride, and love, and fear combined 
to secure the chastity of the family woman. 

Before the institution of the family, chastity, in the modern 
sense, was not held in high esteem. During the tribal period 
the men and the women, within certain restrictions, were 
free to each other. Except during the love period, jealousy 
was unknown. Tribal men would freely lend their women 
as an act of hospitality to the stranger visiting them for 
a night; nor during the tribal period was this freedom pro- 
ductive of evil results. It was while this freedom existed 
that man evolved from the quadramana into the human. 
Then sexual selection was the controlling force, and no 
question of either family or property kept the lover from his 
mate. Only after the institution of private property, with 
its right of succession to the lawful heir, was established 
did the chastity of the woman become of any concern to 
the man. And then it was only the chastity of his own 
women that he cared for. 

For himself, the man, — after the institution of the family, — 
claimed and maintained that freedom which had been the 
equal privilege of both sexes during the tribal period. It 
never so much as entered the mind of archaic man that he 
and his woman were subject to the same standard of morals, 
nor did the archaic woman have any such notion. The man 
lived freely with his concubines under the same roof with 
his wife, and she saw in this no reason for jealousy, no de- 
rogation from her honor. During the whole of the family 
period the family woman has not been ignorant of the fact 
that her man resorts for his pleasure to women outside the 
pale of the family. She is not as a family woman concerned 
for the virtue of the woman of the lower class. In the 
days of slavery the slave woman was the natural prey of 
her master; and wherever slavery prevails the women of 
the master class have no regard whatever for the virtue 
of the slave woman. These slave women are property, their 
children are property ; marriage in any true sense of the 
word is for them out of the question. The millions of 
quadroons, mulattoes, and negroids in the South are abiding 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 9 

witnesses to the impunity with which the free man con- 
sorted with the slave woman. The family as an institution 
made the chastity of the family woman the cardinal law 
of the family life, because upon this depended the due and 
lawful succession of the family property. 

The male offender against this law of the family was 
condemned, not because of his sin against morality, as we 
call it, but because of his violation of the rights of property. 
St. Paul puts the sin upon this basis when, in speaking of 
the male offender, he says: "Let no man go beyond and de- 
fraud his brother in this matter." So all ancient morality views 
adultery as one man's violation of the property rights of 
another man. By this nefarious act the offender robs his 
neighbor of his most sacred possession, he steals into the 
most secret place of the family and appropriates to his seed 
the right to succession in the family property and the priv- 
ilege of participation in the rites of the family religion of 
another man. The man who would do this has always been 
considered deserving of death, and the injured husband has al- 
ways had the right to kill him on sight. But the Manes, 
the Keepers of the Blood of each family, have no regard 
for the blood of any other family except their own, hence 
it is that the injured husband has always been the ridicule 
of his fellow husbands. 

In our day the Manes, the Keepers of the Blood, have 
fled the house. The man is no longer the master of the 
house : his woman has become his equal ; she is demanding 
that he shall be as true to her as she to him, not necessarily 
because she loves him, but because she has the same prop- 
erty rights in him that he has in her. This change in the 
attitude of woman is fraught with consequences that are 
revolutionary in their character. It is destructive of that 
relationship of the woman to the man which was basic to 
the family as an institution. 

The Manes were the spirits of dead men whom the woman 
was required to worship even as she was compelled to obey 
her living lord and master. The modern woman is refusing 
to obey any man who is living, nor will she worship any 



10 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

man who is dead. With the granting of domestic, social, 
and political equality to women, the house band is broken, 
the unity of the family is shattered, the Manes of the family 
are dismissed, and some other institution than that of the 
family (as it was conceived by our fathers and believed in 
by our mothers) must take the place of that ancient form 
of social order as the keeper of the virtue of the man as 
well as of the woman. 



CHAPTER III 
The Lares 

The family as we know it to-day bears little or no relation 
to that ancient institution of which the Lares were the 
Keepers of the Gate. With us the basic principle of the 
family is sex ; with the ancient it was property. With us 
a family, in the popular mind, is composed of a man and 
a woman and children ; with the ancient the family consisted 
of a man possessed of land and house and slaves and women 
and children. A landless man could not, under the ancient 
custom, be a family man. In the estimation of archaic man 
ic was land and house and slaves and cattle that gave sig- 
nificance to wife and children. It was because he was a 
man of property that the ancient desired a son to inherit 
his estate ; and in order to secure a son and heir, he married 
a wife. The sequence in his mind was : first property, then 
a son, then a wife. 

The family in the beginning was an organization for the 
taking and holding of property; or, in other words, it was 
an industrial establishment, corporate in its character, having 
for its purpose the maintenance of the members of the house- 
hold. The property of the family was by family custom 
vested in the oldest living agnate, called the House-Father, 
thus making him a corporation sole. The House-Father, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 11 

being the owner, was the ruler of the house, and his owner- 
ship with its right to rule passed by succession to his eldest 
son. The source of the wealth which gave the family im- 
portance was : first the land and then the slave to work the 
land. 

It was this appropriation of land by each family in sever- 
alty that revolutionized society, substituting the family for 
the tribe as the industrial, social, and political unit. This 
revolution was not accomplished without violence. In the 
beginning the only title a man had to the land which he 
occupied was the right of possession, and this right might 
be, — and was, — called in question by every other man. In 
those days, as always, might was right, and the stronger 
man was ever on the watch to seize upon the land and slaves 
and women and children of the weaker man. It was, there- 
fore, to the interest of each landholder to appropriate only 
so much land as he could defend. Outlying land was a 
source of danger. 

In those early days the title to land was possession and 
use. Because it was to him the source of his life, because 
its cultivation gave him occupation, because upon the land 
he built his house and in the land he made his grave, there- 
fore the land to the archaic man was sacred ; for not only 
was it the home of the living, it was also the place of the 
dead. And it was the dead ancestors in their graves who 
really possessed the land and, as the Lares, were the Keepers 
of the Gates. 

The belief of the ancient man in the ghosts of his fathers, 
with their unknown power to help and harm, was better 
than a title deed to secure each man in the possession of his 
land. Every man feared the Lares of every other man. The 
earth in those days was peopled with a host of spiritual be- 
ings, — unseen, unheard, smiting with the pestilence, and kill- 
ing with the plague. If any untoward accident befell a man, 
or sickness came to him after he had trespassed on his 
neighbor's land, then he, as well as his neighbor, ascribed 
his misfortune to the wrath of the Lares of that land. Thus 
each man had a wholesome fear of the ghosts of his neighbor. 



12 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

He was ready to fight his neighbor, whom he could see, but 
not his neighbor's ghosts, whom he could not see. In the 
good old days every house was haunted and every field be- 
witched, and it was the haunt and the bewitchment that was 
the safety of the house and the land. Domestic religion 
was the keeper of domestic wealth and life. It was the fear 
of the Lares that gave sacredness to property and made of 
theft and trespass not only a crime but a sacrilege. 

During the tribal period property in land was un- 
known and impossible. Then the hunter had the freedom 
of the wood and the fisherman the freedom of the stream ; 
every man lived upon the immediate product of his own 
labor, and his gods were the gods of the sky and the wood 
and the water. Barbarians of the lower order and sav- 
ages have little or no sense of property. The Negro in 
the South did not consider stealing a sin ; coming, as he 
did, a barbarian into the midst of civilization, he had no 
conception of that sacredness of property which is at the 
foundation of the civilized family and state. 

This sacredness of property was religious in its origin. 
It existed for centuries before it gave rise to the civil laws 
that are now its security. The State, having for its main 
function the protection of the rights of private property, 
was not the cause, it was the consequence of those rights. 
Long before the reign of law we had the reign of Lar. 
Each House-Father, absolute Lord and master of his own 
house and land, was under the protection of his Lares; the 
fear of them, and the dread of them was upon all the coun- 
try-round about. If his lands were seized by a stronger 
man than he, his Lares were expelled from the land, the 
graves of his ancestors violated, and he and his household 
weie either killed or reduced to slavery. 

It was this powerlessness of the individual household to 
protect its property that gave rise to the State. The City 
State was an organization of House-Fathers for mutual de- 
fense : a wall, which property-owners of a given neighborhood 
combined to build, behind which they could find safety in 
times of danger. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 13 

The family was the unit of the State; the heads of the 
families were the citizens of the State. Neither the 
women nor the slaves had anything to do with the affairs 
of the City. The family did not merge into the State ; it 
retained all its ancient rights and privileges. The House- 
Father was still the master of the house and of the land, 
still absolute ruler of the women and the children and the 
slaves of his house. The State did not and could not, in 
its earlier period, exercise jurisdiction over the family. Chil- 
dren and women and slaves were judged by the House- 
Father as they had been before the days of the civil law. The 
State at the first did nothing but give the force of law to 
the family customs and privileges already existing. 

This relation of the family to the land, and of the House- 
Father to the family, classified ancient society as master 
and slave, patron and client, patrician and plebeian. 

The House-Father was the superintendent of an indus- 
trial organization in which the slaves were the workers. 
These laborers on the land were given in return for their 
labor just enough to keep them alive and at work. When 
a slave was unprofitable because of age, or sickness, or 
bad temper, he was put to death. In the days of the 
family the power of the master over the slave was unre- 
strained except by self-interest. A House-Father could 
reduce his own children to this servile condition; he could 
even sell his wife into slavery. The master of the house 
was kept in check only by the Spirits of the House; if by his 
violence he threatened the existence of the house, the house 
might restrain him or put him to death. 

But while the Lares, the Keepers of the Gates protected, 
in a measure, the wife and the children, they left the slaves 
exposed to the cruel mercies of rhe master class. Slave 
insurrections, which were of constant recurrence, bear wit- 
ness to the intolerable condition of the working class un- 
der the family rule in the ancient world. That some mas- 
ters were better than other masters is undoubtedly true, 
but all masters were bad, the slaves being the judges. This 
classification of society gave to the master all the bene- 



14 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

fits accruing from the common effort of the family. He had 
honor in the State and leisure for the school. He became 
an educated man, and his education gave him additional power 
over the slave. He was the priest of the family religion. 
The Lares were his Lares, the Keepers of his Gates, and 
he could, not only threaten the recalcitrant slave with the 
lash, but also could scare the soul of the trembling wretch 
out of his body by the fear of the wrath of the Lares of the 
House. As priest of the house the master had over the slave 
the power of a god. 

In every household there were not only wife and children 
and slaves, there were also a number of hangers-on, de- 
pendents upon the bounty of the house, whom the Romans 
called clients : poor relations, freedmen, and the children of 
freedmen. The importance of a master of a house was 
gaged by the number of these hangers-on. They came to 
him early every morning to pay their devotions, they fol- 
lowed him about in public, they were his satellites, and were 
under the protection of his ancestral spirits; the Lares took 
no alarm when the client stepped over the threshold. Clientage 
in some form was common to the family in Greece and Asia, 
while in Rome it assumed the proportions of a vast abuse. 

By the automatic action of the rights of property, families 
themselves were classified as firsts and seconds, — in Rome 
as patrician and plebeian, in England as nobility and gentry. 
The first families, the patrician and the nobles, are those 
who come first in order of time and appropriate the best 
land. Having the advantage of the years over newcomers, 
the ancestors of the patrician are held in higher esteem. 
The chief reliance of the old families is, necessarily, upon 
their ancestry, — these families being important because they 
are old. The man of new family, even though he be a Cicero 
or a Burke, is held in mild contempt by the most witless scion 
of the older families. The Lares of the Nobles are a multitude, 
the Lares of the newcomer can be counted on the fingers. 
The class-struggle between the old families and the newcomer 
has made the history of the world. It ruined the Grecian 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 15 

cities, it disrupted the Roman State, it was productive of civil 
strife in England, and brought about the great cataclysm 
of the French Revolution. 

With the institution of the family, there came into existence 
a class of out-family men and women : runaway slaves, prod- 
igal sons, remnants of broken families, — men and women 
without land, without house, without Manes, without Lares, 
having no place at any family altar. These were by pro- 
fession outcasts, vagabonds, beggars, thieves, and harlots. 
These out-family folk overran the world ; they were the pests 
of the ancient as they are the danger of the modern house ; 
they made up the armies of the conquerors, and in these 
out-family hordes were generated plagues that swept over 
the ancient world, destroying thousands upon thousands ol 
family lives. The Lares of the House had for these outcasts 
a singular and a deadly hatred ; for were they not the natural 
enemies of the house, preying upon its substance and corrupt- 
ing its blood? Private property in land, the basic principle of 
the family, was the fruitful cause of poverty, with the wretch- 
edness and degradation that always follow in its camp. That 
same poverty is to-day destroying the family and changing 
the face of civilization. 

Private property in land has, in the course of time, passed 
out of the keeping of the family Lares into the care of the 
civil law; what a man had once to do for himself society 
now does for him. The Keepers of the Gates are no 
longer the Lares but the lawyers. Land tenure has passed 
far away from the simple principle of occupation and use, 
and is entangled and strangled in a vast and complicated 
legal system most unnatural and unholy. No Lares keep 
the gates of the modern landholder, for the land is no longer 
sacred : it is a commodity to be bought and sold in the market; 
it serves the base uses of speculation. The outlying field 
is no longer a danger, it is a source of wealth. Millions of 
acres of the best land are kept out of use and held for a rise 
in the market. 

The Lares of the archaic world, if they still haunt the 



16 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

earth and hover in the air, must look down in sad, bewildered 
wonderment upon the modern world, which to them must 
seem a mad world, wherein all sane principles have been 
driven out by crazy notions. Here are millions upon millions 
of landless men with wives and children combining to secure 
the title of a few landlords to their land ; these landlords 
doing nothing with or for the land but to take from it rents 
and profits. These two things, idle jland and starving 
people, condemn the world as it is and call for a new race 
of Lares to visit the vengeance of the gods upon these pro- 
faners of the land. 



CHAPTER IV 



The Penates 



The hearth is the heart of the family life. To keep the 
fire alive on the hearth is the bounden duty of the family 
gods. We of the modern world have lost altogether those 
conceptions that made "hearth" and "altar" sacred words. 
Domestic religion sanctified domestic life. The Penates, who 
were the Spirits of Ancestors, were the Keepers of the Fire 
and of the Store. 

It was a long time after man had learned the uses of fire 
before he lost for it his reverential wonder. Its flame was 
his light in the darkness, its heat his protection from the 
cold. Fire has always been worshipped by man, as it is 
written: "Our God is a consuming fire." Fire is alive; it 
leaps and whirls, it jumps and dances. When men wish to 
celebrate they build a fire. There is nothing man dreads 
more than fire, there is nothing man loves more than fire. It 
is for him both creator and destroyer. 

It was the domestication of fire that changed man from a 
savage, living upon roots and raw flesh, into a civilized being, 
feasting on roast beef and baked potatoes. It was the cap- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 17 

ture and taming of fire that made possible the home and the 
family. Because of this, the Penates, the Keepers of the 
Fire, are the best beloved of the family gods. With them 
the family was intimate as it gathered around the hearth 
when the day's work was over; they were present when the 
House-Father and the House-Mother gave bread and meat 
to the children and the slaves, and after the dinner was over 
the Penates inspired the members of the household to speak 
words of love and wisdom one to another. The husband 
could have a secret from his wife, the wife from the husband, 
but to the Penates all secrets were open. The light of their 
fire penetrated to the marrow of the bones. All profanation 
of family life was an offense to the Penates, to be punished 
by the heat of fever and the cold of the chill. 

While the family slept, the Penates watched ; all through 
the night the dull glow of their life was seen in the slow- 
burning brand lying in the ashes, that kept the fire alive on 
the hearth. If that fire died out, the Penates were disgraced, 
and the family shamed; for the life of the fire once gone 
was not easily restored. In these days of matches and elec- 
tricity the smouldering brand has lost its usefulness and, 
therefore, its sacredness. A match is more marvelous than 
a burning brand, electricity still more wonderful than a 
match, but for some reason they neither move us to awe nor 
win us to love. The burning brand, the open fire, and the 
chimney corner were the creation and the haunt of the Pen- 
ates. Our modern improvements have improved these lovely 
gods out of existence. 

The Penates were not only the Keepers of the Fire, they 
were also the Guardians of the Store. It was their duty to 
inspire the cook with skill to make delicate dishes for the 
family table, to watch the meat before the fire, to scare the 
rats from the cupboard. In the archaic world the gods were 
more useful than ornamental. The men and women of that 
world would laugh our gods to scorn and think of them with 
pity, — gods shut up in churches, having nothing to do but to 
listen to the droning of prayers and the confessions of sins ; 
gods who pass their dreary existence away from the warmth 



18 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

of the hearth, the smell of the cooking, the chatter of the 
maids and the stir of the family life ! A god upon a great 
white throne, with cherubim and seraphim bowing before him, 
may have power and dignity, but for comfort and good-fellow- 
ship one must go to the god who sits by the fire, inhales the 
odor of spices, and the flavor of the bread and the cake and 
the meat that are cooking in the kitchen. Such a god can 
understand the tribulations of the cook and the annoyances 
of the mistress ; he knows by experience that fire burns and 
ginger is hot in the mouth. All other religion is cold and 
formal beside this intimate religion of the hearth. 

It might be supposed that since the Penates were the 
gods of the hearth, the Keepers of the Fire and the Store, 
that they were more properly goddesses, and that it was the 
spirit of the ancestress, not of the ancestor, that ruled the 
roast. But not so. The ancient family had no ancestress, 
only ancestor. Archaic man when he established the family 
did not grant the right of divinity to the woman. In the 
estimation of the male the female was not possessed of a 
soul to survive death. Life was in and from the male, and 
to the male belonged the guardianship of life. Man vitalized, 
woman organized. Man as the vitalizer survived ; woman 
perished with the organization. Archaic man did not reason 
philosophically, he took his stand on fact, he saw that he 
could fulfill all his functions save one (and that, so far as 
he was concerned, was a minor one) without woman; while 
without man woman could not accomplish the purpose of 
her being. In the thought of the man woman was made 
for man and not man for woman. It was his right to rule, 
her duty to obey. Man was as much the lord of the hearth 
as he was the keeper of the Gate ; he was both Lares and 
Penates, ruling without the house and within the house both 
in life and in death. 

The institution of the family made the subjection of the 
woman the unalterable law of the family life. As it is writ- 
ten : '"Her desire shall be to her husband and he shall rule 
over her." The doctrine of the domestic equality of woman 
is so foreign to the conception of the family that it makes 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 19 

of that venerable institution a ruin incapable of restoration. 
We may have some other form of social life and call it a 
"family," but that ancient organization known to our fore- 
fathers as the family is passing away before the growing 
demand for woman's rights. Her rights to personality and 
to property are as fatal to the family as is her right to vote. 
In this world purse is power, and if the woman is the keeper 
of the purse, she is in just so far the keeper of the man. 
And for the woman, in any sense, to be the keeper of man 
outrages every principle upon which the family is based. 



CHAPTER V 

New Gods for Old 

All over the world, — even in India, China, and Japan, — 
household worship, with its altar and its gods, its priests 
and its sacrifices, is rapidly passing away. In Europe it 
survives as the cult of a decaying aristocracy, expressing 
itself in pride of birth ; in America it has never found foot- 
hold. In the modern world the family has long since lost 
all knowledge of its divine origin ; or, if it retains a belief 
in its divinity, it bases its faith not on the assumption that 
this or that particular family can trace its descent from some 
ancient divinity, nor does it ascribe divinity to its ancestry 
as a body, but it is divine because the family is an institution 
ordained of God. Its divinity is not a matter of blood ; an- 
cestry has nothing to do with it. 

The religious sanction of the family in the Western Chris- 
tian world rests upon the assertion that it was a creation of 
God in the time of man's innocency, — when in the Garden of 
Eden, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and took 
of his rib and made of it woman and brought her to man 
and decreed that a man should leave his father and his 
mother and cleave unto his wife and they twain should be 



20 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

one flesh. If one does not believe in the reality of this 
transaction in Eden, then for him the family has no religious 
sanction whatever ; it is the outcome of social development, 
maintained as a social convenience. If one does believe that 
God in the beginning made man, male and female and joined 
one male to one female in holy wedlock, then one must hold 
that all families are equally ancient, equally divine, and the 
family of the king takes no precedence over the family of 
the hod-carrier. Either of these theories is fatal to the aris- 
tocratic principle of society, and as no other theory is pos- 
sible in the modern world, aristocracy is everywhere giving 
place to democracy. 

The family as an institution is essentially selfish : the wel- 
fare of the household being the only thought of the household 
gods. When the family was the social, political, and eco- 
nomic unit of the State, the laws were made in the interest 
of the family and not of the community as a whole. Laws 
of primogeniture and entail still hold in England, disinheriting 
the younger children in favor of the eldest son. This self- 
ishness has been productive of untold evil in the world. The 
family has reduced the out-family elements of humanity to 
slavery and serfdom, and condemned the mass of men and 
women, in all ages since the family was instituted, to pov- 
erty and ignorance. To this day the family, even in its 
modified form, is a hindrance to social development. Each 
family looks upon its own things and not on the things of 
others. This selfish attitude of the family man to the outsider 
is exemplified in the attitude of the modern employer to his 
working people. Once I was taken by an employer into his 
factory, and there I saw a girl sitting on a bench, pounding 
a machine with her foot, an occupation she had been steadily 
engaged in for nine hours. In this work she had spent the 
strength of her womanhood; growing old and hopeless and 
haggard before she was twenty. The man for whom this 
girl was working did not give the girl a thought beyond the 
paying her wages. Leaving the factory, we went to the house 
of this man, where his own girl came to meet him, — fresh, 
lovely, full of the joy of living,— and she told, and her father 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 21 

listened to, the story of her day's pleasure. She was his 
daughter, the other woman was his slave. He would have been 
broken-hearted had his daughter been compelled to take the 
place of the woman in the mill. It is this essential selfishness 
of the family and the family gods that has roused against 
the family and its gods that anger of the greater gods ; 
which has driven the Manes from the chamber, the Penates 
from the hearth, and the Lares from the gate. 

All the forces of the modern world, — religious, political, 
and industrial, — are working the destruction of the family 
religion. We can no longer worship our remote ancestors, 
for we are greater gods than they. They were in the be- 
ginning rudimentary men, low browed and light-brained ; 
their instincts were fierce; their manners were brutal; their 
customs foolish. We may owe them gratitude for being 
our ancestors and giving us the chance to live ; we may 
look back upon their lives with pity, but not with admira- 
tion. We no longer reverence the ancients because they 
are ancient. To have lived ten-thousand years ago is not 
an advantage, it is a handicap. 

Our worship is not for our ancestry, but for our posterity. 
Our gods are not dead, they are yet to be born. Man waits 
to-day for superman and longs for the manifestation of these 
sons of the gods. 

Modern religion has ascribed a separate soul to each indiv- 
idual of the household, has unified these souls, not in the 
household soul but in a greater Oversoul, who has no regard 
for family ties. All the great leaders of modern religion.. 
Buddha, Christ, St. Francis, renounced the family in the 
interests of humanity. Religion to-day has shattered the 
family into fragments; it has set the father against the son 
and the son against the father, the daughter against the 
mother and the mother against the daughter; it has freed 
the wife from subjection to the husband, making her his 
equal in the presence of the gods. 

Political influences are to-day antagonistic to the integrity 
of the family, which is no longer the unit of the State. The 
powers of the State have invaded the household and de- 



22 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

stroyed its government; the House- Father has been compelled 
to abdicate ; the law of the State has superseded the law of 
the house; a man has no longer the ownership of his wife 
or his children or his servants ; these are all the free citizens 
of a free State. 

The head of the family to-day has duties but no privileges ; 
he must pay the debts of his wife, but she is not responsible 
for his obligations; he must support his growing children, 
but they owe no reciprocal duty to his declining strength. 
Though the head of the family has still testamentary right 
over his property, every day sees that right limited more 
and more by the civil law. Primogeniture and entail no 
longer buttress the family, except in England. Income and 
inheritance taxes assert the right of the community to ap- 
propriate to its uses the family wealth. The family survives 
in the modern world a mere ghost of its ancient self; having 
the same name, but not being the same thing. 

By far the most potent of all the enemies of the family 
is the modern system of industry, which has taken from 
the family its occupation, removed its hearth, stilled its 
wheels, put out its fires. The work of the family is no 
longer done in the family, by the family, for the family; 
its baking, its brewing, its spinning, its weaving, its sowing, 
and its reaping are not the work of the family, but of the 
community upon which the family is dependent. Each indi- 
vidual is related, economically, not to the family but to the 
community. The boys and the girls must go out of the 
home to earn their living. Household religion is gone, be- 
cause household life is gone. 

The gods of the churches have broken down the altars of 
the Manes, the gods of the city have removed the gates of 
the Lares, and the gods of industry have put out the fires 
of the Penates on the hearth. 



Book II 
GODS OF THE GREEK DYNASTY 



CHAPTER VI 

The God of Space 

In the history of the religious life of the Greeks the gods 
succeed one another, after the manner of kings. There are 
divine dynasties as well as human, each having its day, then 
passing away to give room to its successor ; these dynasties 
being coeval with given stages in the industrial, social, and 
political development of the people. 

The first of these dynasties is that of the god known to 
the Greeks as Ouranos, to the Latins as Uranus, and to the 
Hindoos as Varuna. This god had little or no influence on 
the life of the Western world during the historic period; 
for the Greeks he was only a starting point; for the Latins 
nothing but a name. To find him in his prime, we must go 
back to the time when the Aryan race was emerging from 
middle into higher barbarism and was substituting the life 
of the shepherd for the life of the hunter. In thinking of 
the religions of Europe we must remember that none of them 
is indigenous to the soil. All the gods worshipped in the 
Western world are from the East, because the races of men 
who during this historic period have inhabited the continent 
of Europe are of Eastern origin. Man came into Europe 
from the East and brought his gods with him. Middle Asia 
is the birthplace of the gods, because it is the birthplace of 
the Aryan and Semitic races. 

The Aryan people, who are now dominant on the earth, 
developed their racial character on the northern slope of the 
Persian hills. That region was rich in pasture land, and 
man soon found that it was easier to get his meat by raising 
it in the fields than by hunting for it in the forest; so from 
a huntsman he became a herdsman and a shepherd. This 

25 



26 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

change in occupation necessitated changes in his habits of 
life and opened up to him new vistas of thought. Man's 
attitude toward the beasts became defensive as well as of- 
fensive. He discovered that many animals were worth more 
to him alive than dead : the living cow gave him milk and 
butter and cheese for his eating; the living sheep wool for 
his clothing. It was a great step towards a higher life 
when man, in his own interest, began to assume this defen- 
sive attitude toward the beasts of the field. This bred in 
him a feeling of affection and a sense of responsibility. The 
relation of the shepherd to the sheep gave rise to thoughts 
and feelings which have made a lasting impression on the 
mind and heart of humanity. The shepherd was the lord 
of the sheep, and his relations to his flock were symbolic 
to him of his relations to his god. The best a shepherd 
could say of his god was : "The Lord is my Shepherd." In 
that saying he expressed all the watchfulness, all the anx- 
iety that he exercised and that beset him in his care of 
his sheep. He needed his sheep, and his sheep needed him ; 
in like manner, he needed his god, and his god needed him. 

The shepherd life changed the relation of man to the in- 
animate as well as to the animate world. This life classified 
animals as domestic and wild, as the friends and enemies of 
man ; it distinguished nature as heaven and earth, the one 
the home of man, the other region of the gods, the one 
familiar and subject to man, the other mysterious and be- 
yond the power of his will. Not until he became a shepherd 
did man see the sky. The fetich gods of the savage are 
all of the earth, — stones and stocks of trees — it is only as 
he emerges into barbarism and has domesticated animals and 
comes out of the gloom of the cave and the forest into the 
pasture that man can look up into the sky and can find in it 
the inspiration of his hope and the reason of his fear. 

It was the shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks 
by night, to whom this god of the sky was first revealed. 
It was in the night that they saw him and feared and wor- 
shipped him. We who never see the sky at night, or, seeing 
it, feel ourselves in no near relation to it; we, to whom the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 27 

sky is infinite space in which whirl infinite worlds, can have 
no notion of the thoughts of the primitive shepherd, as he 
lay upon his back, looking into the sky on the hills of 
Persia, twenty-thousand years ago; for to him there was 
no sense of space and no conception of the infinite. The sky 
was as near to him as the earth, and the stars were not so 
far away as tops of the mountains. What he saw in the sky was 
not the mighty play of impersonal forces but the action of 
beings like himself, having body, parts, and passions, moved, 
as he was moved, by love and hate, by hope and fear. As 
he watched the sky through the long night, he saw it move 
over his eye, carrying in its motion the moon and the stars; 
slowly bringing the various groups of stars from the dark- 
ness of the east and dropping them one by one, as the night 
went on, into the darkness of the west. The primitive 
shepherd knew nothing of the revolution of the earth on 
its axis ; indeed, it was a long time before he was aware that 
the stars were the same stars night after night and season 
after season; he saw the moon from a rim of light grow 
to the full and then become a rim of light again and go out 
into the darkness, and it was always a new moon to him. 

Out of these thoughts of the shepherd was the god Va- 
runa made, — Varuna, who belongs to the earliest period of 
Aryan development, to the pastoral age, just as it was suc- 
ceeding to the forest age, when man was ceasing to be a 
hunter and becoming a keeper of sheep. 

Then, as always, man reasoned from the known to the 
unknown. He accounted for the sky by ascribing to it the 
attributes of his own nature. The sky was to his archaic 
mind nothing but a bigger man ; the earth was his wife, and 
the moon and the stars were his children. Every night his 
children were born, and every night, as fast as they were 
born, he thrust them back again into the dark places of the 
earth, much to the discomfort of his long suffering wife. 

The stories told of Varuna, — or, to give him his most 
familiar name, Uranus, — bear the impress of the untutored 
mind from which they came. In that early time man, still 



28 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

a savage, was savage to his wife and children ; for he learned 
to love his sheep long before he came to love his wife and 
his sons and his daughters. Domestic tragedies in ancient 
times were not exposed in the law courts, they were enacted 
within the precincts of the home ; the wives were tortured, 
children enslaved, and when desperation was born of cruelty, 
husbands and fathers were killed. 

It is such a story as this that attaches itself to the god 
Varuna : He is a tyrant in the home. Gea (the Earth) who 
is his wife, outraged both as a wife and a mother, stirs up 
her children to rebellion; one of whom, at her instigation, 
mutilates his father Sky and separates him forever from his 
mother Earth ; so that she can have no more children by him. 
These outre stories of Uranus and Gea reflect, as we have 
learned, the state of the savage mind that gave them utter- 
ance and the conditions of savage life that made them credible. 
We must remember that these stories were believed in their 
day as firmly as we believe the stories told us in our churches; 
for Uranus and Gea were the gods of the shepherd world 
as surely as Jesus and Mary are the divinities of the Christian 
world. 

The story of the mutilation of Uranus and of his exile from 
the embraces of the earth come naturally at the end and not 
at the beginning of his reign as a god. In the mythology 
of the East we find him recorded as the chief god of the 
Aryan people. In his worship of Uranus the Aryan mas- 
tered the conception of space. The name of this god in 
the Sanscrit means "extension," "spread out." In looking 
at the sky man discovered that, while he could see it with his 
eye, he could not reach it with his hand ; thus he became 
aware of a world beyond his finger-tips, and the sense of dis- 
tance was acquired, while "far" and "near" became thought 
in the human mind. The sense of space never came before 
the experience of space; it is an acquisition made in space 
itself. When first born we do not have it; since as children 
we cry for the moon. "Far" and "near" at first are only 
"big" and "little" to us. Yet we come to the knowledge 
of space so early that we think we have always had it; and 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 29 

only by experimenting with the very young are we able to 
convince ourselves that once we thought that all the world 
was well within our reach. 

It was this growing sense of distance that caused the de- 
cline of the power of the god Uranus. Men came to see that 
the stars were farther away than the tops of the mountains. 
Little by little the sky has receded from the earth. At 
first Earth and Sky embraced at the horizon, and one had 
but to walk to the edge of the earth to lay his hand on the 
rainbow. Night after night the Sky came down and lay 
with the Earth in the darkness. Then the Sky was lifted 
until it was just beyond the tops of the mountains, and Olym- 
pus was the stepping-stone from Earth to heaven. But 
later the sky was withdrawn above the clouds, and the gods 
were miles away, sitting upon the circle of the heavens. 

But not until Giordano Bruno lifted up his eyes did man 
see infinite space as the home of infinite worlds. We never 
stop to think how recent our conception of the sky is, how 
absent this notion was from the mind of man through all 
the ages down to the present, nor how difficult it is even for 
us to entertain this thought and give it reality. 

The great mass of people never think of the sky as far, 
far away, it is always very near to them, and still the home 
of their god. Uranus, though he had very little to do with 
the development of the life of the Aryan people after their 
migration into Europe, was not lost to them. The stories 
that were told to his discredit were gradually either explained 
away or forgotten. In the Greek language he gave his name 
to the sky and to this day we are compelled to think of him 
when we tell of One who came preaching the kingdom of 
heaven, for is not this in the Greek, TI gaacXeia tou Oupavou — 
the kingdom of Uranus? 

We still look to the sky in hope and fear ; from it comes 
the light of our eyes ; from it falls the early and the later 
rain; from it the great god Uranus still sends down his snow 
like wool and scatters his hoarfrost like ashes ; out of it come 
lightning-flashes of wrath and rolling thunders of displeas- 



30 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

tire ; in it are gendered the tempests that uproot the trees of 
the forests ; from it fall the waters that flood the earth when 
the windows of heaven are opened. 

The shepherd on the Aryan hills, in his worship of the sky, 
has made us forever his debtors ; for in his crude imaginations 
we have the beginning of astronomy, and the seed-thoughts 
of theology and philosophy. Uranus, the god of the shepherds 
of the East, is still the greatest of gods ; in him are all poten- 
tialities, out of him all worlds are born, into him all worlds die. 
He is the maker of the day and the keeper of the night. 
Darkness and Light to him are both alike. 

It is our misfortune that we seldom or never see him. 
With the shepherd life has gone the shepherd's intimacy with 
Uranus. Having no occasion to watch, we never wake to 
see the heavens as they manifest the glory of their God. 
What man of us has ever lain awake all night and watched 
the Great Bear go down into the darkness below the horizon ; 
who of us has seen the Moon gliding in and out among the 
stars, hastening across the sky, like some lovelorn maiden to 
her tryst, until she has become to us the symbol of the mis- 
tress of our heart, to whom we liken her? — saying of that 
mistress : 

Your darksome hair up-gathered from 
Your thoughtful brow. 

Ts like the wreathed cloud above the Moon 
Which all night long as she her stately 

journey makes among the stars, 
Follows after, 
Shadowing her way. 

Who of us has ever seen the storm gather and the rain 
fall, as the grey cloud follows the black? House-dwellers 
that we are, blinded by the daylight, revelling or sleeping by 
night ! — we never know the beauty nor the terror of Uranus, 
who dwells in the light unapproachable and broods in the 
impenetrable darkness. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 31 

CHAPTER VII 

The God of Time 

Chronos, the god who mutilated and deposed Uranus, was 
not of Aryan origin, nor is there any trace of him in the 
religious life of the Aryan people until after their migration 
into Europe and their settlement in the peninsulas of Greece 
and Italy. His history is obscure, and the etymology of his 
name uncertain. Because his cult prevailed over the cult 
of Uranus, he was under the law of succession, held by the 
early mvthologists to be the son of the god who preceded 
him ; but this relationship cannot be established. Chronos 
intrudes himself between Uranus and Zeus, who are both 
Aryan gods and, according to the laws of mythology stand 
in the relation of father and son. 

We can account for Chronos only by the conjecture that 
he was god of the people who were in possession of the land 
at the time of the first migration of the Aryan tribes into 
Southern Europe. These people were of Semitic stock, com- 
ing from Syria and the regions south and east of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea; but whatever their origin, they had established 
a mode of life based upon agriculture as the chief source of 
their food supply. The rich, contracted valleys of Greece 
and Italy, with their abundance of sunshine and rain, made 
those countries almost of necessity farming countries. The 
live stock was no longer the main source of wealth ; the 
cattle and the sheep being subordinated in this agricultural 
system, to the field and the orchard ; for the land was too 
limited and too valuable to be put into pasture. The corn 
and the vine and the olive gave man bread and oil and wine, 
and these, in that semi-tropical climate, were more whole- 
some as food than was the flesh of animals. Animal food, 
of course, had its place in the economy of this people, but, 
as in all tropical and semi-tropical countries, it was con- 
sidered less essential than a vegetable and fruit diet. 

In this region religion was rustic in its character, and had 
to do with sowing and reaping and gathering into barns. 



32 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Of this religion Chronos was, undoubtedly, the chief deity 
at the time of the Aryan migration. 

Chronos was a god of vegetation. His sign was the sickle, 
which he used to mutilate Uranus ; his principal festivals 
were at the Spring and the Autumnal equinox, and if human 
sacrifices were offered to him, that rite was but a survival 
from savage times and indicative of the thought that the 
blood and sweat of man must be given to the soil, if the soil 
were expected to yield of its life to the service of man. That 
he was the god of the farmer is evident from the fact that 
the Romans recognized him as the prototype of their god 
Saturn, who was the god of the rustic, presiding over the 
industries and securing, by his favor, the prosperity of the 
farmer. 

At the time of the Aryan invasion these southern farmers 
were farther along in the course of human evolution than 
were their northern conquerors. The agricultural life has 
in it more educational possibilities than the pastoral; since 
the agricultural life is a settled life, which gives more time 
for thought than does a roaming one. A farmer must neces- 
sarily be a more or less close observer of the courses of 
nature; he must be weather-wise; must adapt himself to 
times and seasons. His life is governed by sequences. He 
must sow, and then he must wait for the harvest before he 
can reap. This mode of life makes a man conscious of what 
we call ''time." 

The sense of time is so instinctive with us, after we reach 
consciousness, that we think of it as intuitive rather than 
experimental, — a form of thought antecedent to experience 
rather than a view of the world acquired by experience. This 
relation of the sense of time to the nature of man has been, 
is, and always will be the bone of contention with philosoph- 
ers. The schools of Locke and Kant will dispute till the 
end of time as to whether time is an inborn faculty or is 
dependent on experience and education. That the sense of 
time is from experience we may infer from the fact that 
young children have little or no sense of time and very aged 
men lose such sense entirelv. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 33 

The order of nature separates time into periods of light 
and dark, following one another in regular sequence. The 
shadows slowly shortening to the westward until the mer- 
idian, and then as slowly lengthening to the eastward until 
the sunset must have suggested to man the sundial and the 
division of time into morning and evening, as well as into 
day and night. But even so simple an instrument for the 
marking of time was not possible until man's life was reg- 
ulated into periods of work and rest. It is the plowman, 
not the hunter nor the herdsman, who watches the after- 
noon shadows grow longer, for the reason that the length- 
ening shadows mean to him cessation from toil. The occupa- 
tion of the hunter or the herdsman may be dangerous or 
tedious, but is not toilsome. Time and toil became associated 
in the mind of man when he put his hand to the plow and 
the hoe, the sickle and the flail, and began to work at a daily 
task for so many hours a day. Not until man went forth 
to his work and to his labor until the evening did the evening 
mean anything to him. It was on the farm that the sense 
of time was fully developed. 

We also owe to agriculture the division of time into 
months and years. We have calendars to tell us the name 
of the day and the name of the month, yet we give no 
thought to the marvel of that simple contrivance ; never con- 
sider how impossible it would be to order our lives if the 
days and the months had no names ; hardly meditate on the 
fact that there was a time when the articulate calendar had 
no existence and men had to be satisfied with the broad dis- 
tinction of day and night, seedtime and harvest, summer and 
winter. 

The division of time is religious in its origin. So won- 
derful is this division that men have always ascribed it to 
their gods. New moons and sabbaths are holy unto the 
Lord. 

It was during the early agricultural period that the founda- 
tions of Chronology were laid ; great religious festivals mark 
the seasons. The lives of the gods are manifest in the 
phenomena of vegetation. The god is forever dying and 



34 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

forever coming into life again. Buried in the ground and 
left to rot, he rises from the ground into newness of life 
and brings joy to a desolate earth. The annual renewal of 
life in the vegetable world deeply impressed the mind of the 
primitive farmer ; for to him it was a manifestation of the 
great mystery in which was concealed the life and the pur- 
pose of .his god. It was his god who blossomed and fruited 
in the summer, his god who died and went down into dark- 
ness in the winter, and rose again from the dead in the 
springtime. 

Of this religion of the fields Chronos was the ruling deity 
when it came in conflict with the *igion of the migrating 
Aryan shepherds and herdsmen, who worshipped Uranus, 
the god of the pasture. These hardy men from the North 
found no difficulty in making a conquest of these farmers of 
the South, taking from them their lands and reducing them 
to slavery. But while they could subdue the men, they 
could not displace the god of the country. It was not possible 
to live the pastoral life in the contracted valleys of Greece 
and Italy. Agriculture offered an easier way to obtain a 
richer living. The conquerors of the land became the owners 
of the land, while the people of the land as slaves cultivated 
the land, the masters reaping the fruits of their labor. This 
is no speculation, it is a grim fact that has been repeated over 
and over again in the history of the world. After a conflict 
more or less severe and prolonged between the agricultural 
and the pastoral mode of life the agricultural prevailed. 
Uranus, the god of the pasture, was dethroned and banished, 
and Chronos, the god of the fenced field, reigned in his 
stead. 

During the reign of Chronos the institution of the family 
came to its perfection. During this period the family based 
upon the land, rooted in the soil, was consecrated by the lapse 
of time. Each landholder was lord and master within his 
holding, and was succeeded by his oldest living agnate. 
Chronos did not supplant the household gods of the Aryan 
people; he merely supplemented them. As the god of veget- 
ation he was the common god of all the farmers, and the cele- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 35 

bration of his festivals promoted a community spirit that 
tended to modify the selfishness of family life. 

The stories that are told of Chronos illustrate the rudeness 
and the cruelty of that early period of human history. His 
fear of his children, his disregard of his wife, his consuming 
ambition to live and rule are characteristic of the man of the 
time in whose image this god was made. 

The story of Chronos is the story of man's mastery not 
only of the earth but of the sky. He was the youngest of 
the Titans, — those fierce children of Uranus and Gea who 
rage in the air, over land and sea. The destructive forces 
of the wind and rain v - e, in the person of Chronos, subdued 
to the uses of man ; he was the wind blowing, not as a gale 
but as a breeze ; the water falling, not in floods but in showers. 
He was the incarnation of the growing intelligence of man 
getting the best of the non-intelligent forces of nature. Aris- 
totle and other Greek writers traced the name of the god 
of the field to chronos, the Greek word for "time," but modern 
philologists dispute this, and refer the name to the root from 
which we have the verb chronizo, which means, "to do," "to 
accomplish." 

It matters not which of these derivations is correct, or 
whether both of them are true, the name of Chronos will be 
forever associated in the mind of man with the thought of 
time. He is the Ancient of days ; the Keeper of the Golden 
Years. The treasures of the past are his, and all we can 
say of the future is that "Time will tell." 



CHAPTER VIII 



The City God 

The story of the dethronement and banishment of Chronos 
by Zeus is, with some minor differences, a repetition of the 
story of the treatment of Uranus by Chronos. Having been 



36 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

told that he is doomed to be dethroned and exiled by one 
of his children, Chronos strives to cheat his destiny by swal- 
lowing his children as fast as they are born. Rhea, his wife, 
does not approve of this method of disposing of her offspring, 
so when Zeus is born she hides him in a cave in Mount Ida, 
and gives old Chronos a stone to swallow in the place of his 
son. Zeus, growing rapidly to manhood, rises in rebellion 
against his father Chronos, compels his sire to disgorge first 
the stone (which is ever after sacred), then, one after another, 
Poseidon, Hades, and Hera, the brothers and sister of Zeus, 
who seem none the worse for having dwelt so long in the 
interior of their father. Zeus, having driven Chronos into 
the remote parts of the earth, organizes his brothers and 
sister into a heavenly hierarchy, begets gods and goddesses 
and divine men and women innumerable, and reigns as chief 
deity over the destinies of the Hellenic people during the 
whole of their historic existence. Long before Zeus had 
ceased to be worshipped as a god, the Greeks had lost their 
place and power in the world. 

The true history of Zeus, as of all the gods, is not written 
by the poets in the sacred books, but is to be deciphered by 
the critical faculty in the life and language of the people. 
Zeus, an Aryan god of the purest blood, was not born, as 
the poets say, on Mount Ida; he had his beginning on that 
great watershed of gods and men, the northern slope of the 
Persian hills. The root of his name has produced the greatest 
words that have ever been spoken by Aryan men; for from 
that root has come such words as "day," "dawn," and "div- 
inity." 

Zeus, before he became the reigning god of the last Greek 
dynasty, was known to his worshippers as Dyaus, the root of 
his name was div or duy, which is the root of all the words that 
we use at the present time in connection with the day. 

Dyaus, in Aryan mythology, was second only to Uranus 
or Varuna. Varuna was the god of the sky as the shepherds 
saw it at night; Dyaus was the god of the bright sky in 
its morning glow and noonday splendor. The root idea 
of the name Dyaus is brightness, the gleam of gold and 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 37 

the splendor of brass. This god presided over the life of 
man during his hours of activity. He was not as Varuna, 
the god of mystery, breeding fear in the darkness; he was 
the god of the daylight, making all things clear to the eye 
of man. During the hours of Dyaus, the work of life was 
done ; the cows were milked and driven to pasture ; the 
fields were ploughed ; the seed was sown ; the harvest was 
reaped. Within the house the women baked the bread, 
spun the thread, weaved the cloth, and made the garments 
for the use of the household. Of all the gods there was 
none greater than Dyaus the god of the daylight, who filled 
the heavens and flooded the earth with his glory. 

This god became more and more powerful in proportion 
as man employed the daylight to study and improve his 
manner of living. It was under his guidance that man 
passed from higher barbarism into civilization. Thus is Zeus 
the god of civilization, expressing the thoughts and feelings 
that have dominated the civilized man from the earliest 
period of reclamation from savagery down to the present. 

In the early days of Dyaus human society was organizing 
itself along the lines it has followed ever since. The family, 
with its subjection of women and enslavement of the work- 
ing class, was in process of establishment : the leisure class 
was developing. The heads of families, — the masters of 
women, children, and slaves, — lived upon the labor of these 
subject classes. Labor was falling into disrepute, to escape 
from the necessity of labor was becoming the ruling ambi- 
tion. No longer were the heads of families shepherds, or 
farmers, or woodmen. Organizing unconsciously for mutual 
profit, they built for themselves cities and established the 
state, of which they were the rulers, the statesmen, the politi- 
cians. Fighting was no longer left to the impulses of the 
people ; it was organized into war. The soldier was gradu- 
ally differentiated from the industrial worker; and the heads 
of families and their sons were the captains of the armed 
force that defended the city from without and held in sub- 
jection the slave population within. Having mastered the 
process of smelting iron, man had a sword for his hand, 



38 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

a sharpened tip for his spear, and thus were the bow and 
arrow, in a measure, discarded. Fighting was reduced to a 
science ; war was practiced as an art. 

These conditions of civilization were far advanced when 
the second great Aryan invasion swept down over southern 
Europe. The earlier Aryan emigrants had forgotten their 
fatherland, had mingled their blood with the Semite and the 
Basque, and worshipped not the gods of their Aryan fathers 
but the gods of the country in which they lived, when these, 
their younger brothers, came down upon them, took from 
them their lands, dethroned their gods, and enslaved their 
persons. 

This later migration of the Aryans was not tribal, it was 
clannish. The clan (the tribe was antecedent, the clan pos- 
terior to the family) was a cluster of consanguine families 
moving as a body to seek for themselves new and better land ; 
their purpose was conquest and settlement. These emigrants 
brought with them their customs and institutions, — political 
and religious, — which they substituted for those already ex- 
isting in the territory that they conquered and appropriated. 
European civilization is Aryan because Aryan men brought 
the elements of that civilization with them and planted it 
in Europe; for the same reason American civilization is 
European. 

The principle of that early civilization was the ownership 
of land in severalty by the family, the subjection of all the 
members of the family to the House-Father, the enslavement 
of the working class, and the exaltation of property as the 
end and aim of the social organization. Property in the 
sources of wealth and property in the labor of men became, 
by the processes of civilization, the privilege of the few and 
the poverty of the many. 

The religion of this early ruling class expressed itself in 
the worship of light and power, or rather of light as power. 
The powerful man in an organized society is the intelligent 
man, the man who sees. Napoleon is physically the least 
of the soldiers of France, intellectually he commands them all. 

Zeus is the god of the social order, because he is the god 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 39 

of light as power. He is the one who sees what is to be 
done, and does it. The Aryan man has from the beginning 
worshipped this god of light as power, and his god has given 
him. dominion in the earth. 

Historically Zeus presided over the beginnings of Western 
civilization. He was the greatest of the city or political 
gods who, in the worship of mankind, succeeded the family 
gods and the nature gods. It is true that Zeus never became 
the city god of any particular city; but that was because he 
was the common god of all the cities of Greece. In him 
Grecian civilization was unified. To find him as a city god 
pure and simple, we must go westward into Italy and study 
his character as he presided over the greatest of the city 
states from its foundation to its fall. 

The titular god of the city of Rome was Jupiter Capitolinus. 
Now "Jupiter" is none other than "Zeus-piter" 1 or "Zeus- 
father." He centers in himself the attributes of the nature 
gods and the household gods ; as a nature god he is Jupiter 
Pluvius and Jupiter Tonans, having command of the rain 
and being the maker of the thunder, — as Jupiter Capitolinus, 
he has the guardianship of the city. 

City life in the ancient worlds was simply the enlargement 
of domestic life, and was essentially religious in its constitu- 
tion. Each city was in the keeping of the city gods. It 
was the duty of these gods to protect their city against the 
gods of other cities. Each city, like each household, had 
its own divinities who cared only for the welfare of their 
particular community and were hostile to all others. Each 
god must fight for his own against all comers. Religion 
in those days, as always, was a principle not of unity but of 
separation. There were gods many and lords many in com- 
petition for the worship of men, and nothing was more de- 
lightful to a god than to have his worshippers go out 
against the worshippers of other gods and beat them on 
the field of battle. It was religion that gave intensity to 
ancient city life and made patriotism a sacred duty. The 

1 Piter or phiter, the Aryan word for "father." 



40 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

separation of religion from politics would have seemed an 
unpardonable sin to the citizen of the ancient city state, — the 
last blasphemy of the gods, their exclusion from their rightful 
place in the economy of the state. These divine beings 
were as much a part of the life of the city as were the men 
and women who thronged its streets; without them nothing 
could be done. All the business of the state was sacred, 
because it was transacted in the presence and under the 
guidance of the city gods. The priests of the gods were 
the magistrates of the city, leading its armies and making 
its laws. In the earlier period of city life, as in the earlier 
period of the family life, the head of the city, like the head 
of the house, was pontifex maximus, — high priest of the city 
religion. Our division into Church and State was unknown 
to the ancient world ; for at that time the state was the church 
and the church was the state. 

The gods were so intimate to the life of the city that the 
fortune of the one was the fortune of the other. When 
the city was taken the gods were dethroned, — the ancient city 
gods passing away with the civilization of the ancient city 
state over which they presided. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Gods of the Leisure Class 

The Olympian gods, of whom Zeus was the primate, were 
essentially the gods of the ruling, leisure class, for the benefit 
of which class civilization exists. The great mass of the 
people have from the beginning had little or no share in the 
benefits that have come from the political organization of 
society. The ruling classes, being at the place of advantage, 
have always appropriated the wealth that has been created 
by the organization. The laboring classes have always been 
the lower classes, supporting civilization as an underground 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 41 

foundation, but having no share in the security, the light, 
and the beauty of the superstructure. Whether as the slaves 
of the ancient world, the peasant serfs of the middle age, 
or the wage-worker of the modern world, this class has always 
been without the pale of society. It serves but it does not 
sit at the social table. It is questionable whether the process 
of civilization has not been for the hurt rather than to the 
advantage of mankind as a whole. 

The right to leisure, which is necessary to the development 
and enjoyment of life, has been appropriated by one class 
and denied to the other. The very name "working class" 
is significant. It has always been the ambition of man to 
get rid of the necessity of working for his living. The savage 
laid upon the woman the labor of the field and the house, 
keeping for himself the lighter, more leisurely occupation 
of hunting and fishing, and the excitement of war. Civilized 
man has exploited the uncivilized elements of humanity and 
lived upon the fruits of their labor. The ruling class has 
for the working class feelings of indifference, contempt, and 
hatred. As long as the working class is submissive, patient, 
and willing, the ruling class has for it indifference and scorn; 
when it is restive and rebellious, hatred born of fear. 

This relation of the classes was more explicit in the ancient 
civilization than it is in the mbdern. In the ancient civiliza- 
tion this relation was the expression of a religious principle : 
the gods were the gods of the master class; the subjection of 
the women and the children and the slaves was divinely order- 
ed ; he who rebelled against that order rebelled against the 
gods. 

All the characteristics of civilized man are seen in the lives 
of the Olympian gods. The cultivated intelligence, the grow- 
ing sense of beauty and order, the desire for cleanliness, the 
love of freedom, the self-assertion, the religiosity, the rapacity, 
the callousness, the contempt for poverty and weakness, the 
insatiable appetite for pleasure, the disregard of the moral 
order, the imperviousness to ideas, which have been from the 
first the characteristics of the ruling class of the Aryan, were 
also the salient features of the gods whom he worshipped. 



42 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The Aryan man of the ancient state had the advantage of 
his descendant in the modern world, — he had not come under 
the bondage of an alien religion. His religion and his life 
were both of a piece. If he pursued a maiden for her beauty, 
was not Zeus known far and wide for his amours? If he tor- 
tured a slave for thinking of freedom, did not Zeus, for the 
same offense, chain Prometheus to the crag? If he ran away 
with his neighbor's wife, was not that the favorite sport of the 
gods of Olympus? If he went out on a foray and brought 
back as spoils the goods and the souls of his enemy, did he 
not enrich his god and impoverish the god of his defeated 
foe? We find the character of Zeus manifested in all the 
men whom the Aryan race has loved most to honor. He 
is the prototype of Alexander, of Caesar, and of Napoleon ; 
his court rivals in splendor and in license the court of Louis 
XIV before the days of Maintenon ; he patronizes the arts 
and the sciences, with all the liberality of Lorenzo the Mag- 
nificent. 

These gods of the leisure class were the promoters of 
science, the patrons of art, the protectors of letters, and the 
upholders of religion. When we think of what they and 
their worshippers have accomplished for humanity, we are 
compelled to acknowledge that they are worth the price that 
mankind has paid for their services. Without the leisure class 
and their gods man would not be the master of life that he is. 
It is not work but leisure, not restraint but freedom, that has 
enabled him to evolve those higher faculties that express them- 
selves in science and art, in letters and in organized religion. 
The gods of the leisure class are not poets, but they patronize 
poetry ; they pay blind Homers in pennies to sing of them in 
the halls of their devotees ; nor are these gods prophets, but 
they are the unfailing support of the priests, who live in their 
temples and eat of their sacrifices. 

The gods of the Greek dynasty are the gods of the intel- 
ligence but, with one exception, not the gods of pure reason. 
Both they and their worshippers are hostile to originality. 
In the course of its history the Greek people produced two 
men of the highest order of genius in the region of pure reason, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 43 

but neither of these men was in favor with the ruling class: 
Socrates, the greater of the two, charged with corrupting the 
youth and depraving the religion of the city, was put to death 
by the rulers of Athens ; while Plato, his disciple, was cast into 
prison by Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. It is to be said,, 
however, for the Greek gods of the Olympian dynasty, that 
they are not alone in their hatred of innovation, — a feeling 
common to all gods. The gods are the creation of past achieve- 
ment crystallized into the present order. In fighting innova- 
tion they are fighting for life. Whoever would change exist- 
ing conditions must always first wrestle with and overcome 
the gods, for gods always belong to the conservative party. 

The gods of the Olympiad, being the gods of the leisure 
class, protected the interests of that class at the expense of 
the other classes of society. Zeus was the god of the House- 
Father, to whom he gave power over the women, the children, 
and the slaves. The women and the children shared with 
the House-Father, in a measure, in the favor and protection 
of the gods ; they were essential to the continuance of the 
house and to the permanence of the existing religion. The 
House-Father could not by his neglect or his cruelty impair 
the integrity of his family without incurring the wrath both 
of the gods of the house and the gods of the city. Religion 
protected the wife and the children against the unrestrained 
strength of the man. 

But the slave, either taken in war or purchased with money, 
was outside the pale of divine protection. Instead of ab- 
horring slavery, the gods delighted in it. The captive slave 
was the spoil of the war, the reward of the triumphant god 
over the defeated god, — and the ancient god had no pity for 
weakness. Poverty was a crime visited with enslavement 
or death. In archaic times the exploitation of the weak by 
the strong was practiced without limit and without remorse. 
It was the divine order. "Vae victis!" was the cry of the 
gods as well as of the men of that primitive age. Prosperity 
was a sign of the favor of the gods, adversity of their dis- 
pleasure. The master class saw in the misery of the lower 
class the visitation of the wrath of the gods. His religion 



44 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

made him callous to the sufferings of his fellow-men. Cruelty 
was practiced as a function of religion. To this day the 
master class of the Aryan people has exploited the lower class 
in the name of his gods. His mastership is a divine right; 
the subjection and misery of the lower class a divine ordering. 
Without that subjection and misery the master class could 
not exist, and with the existence of the master class is bound 
up the existence of civilization. Slavery in some form or 
other is the sacrifice that the gods of civilization have always 
demanded as a condition of their favor. 

In imputing to the gods of the Olympiad a disregard of 
morality, I have perhaps done them an injustice; for morality 
is a relative term, the morality of one age being the im- 
morality of another. Moreover, the gods, like the kings, 
have always been above the law and, like the kings, can do 
no wrong. The Olympian gods had, it is true, little regard 
for our modern standard of morals; but they had a morality 
of their own and that of a very high order. The virtue that 
they practiced and rewarded was the virtue of self-expression, 
bodily perfection, intellectual clearness ; beauty of form and 
clarity of speech were the essence of their life, 
was a sin, intellectual slovenliness a crime. Their 
moral conception was expressed in the words To xaAov, - 
that which is beautiful and good and proper. As a con- 
sequence of its morality, the Olympian religion developed 
the human form in comeliness, so that its beauty was the 
inspiration of the highest sculptural art to which the genius 
of man ever has or ever can attain; and it evolved the one 
perfect language ever used by man for the expression of his 
thoughts. 

The European Aryan, for reasons that will appear laler, 
came under the power of an alien god, was subjected to an 
alien morality, and has for centuries been in rebellion against 
this alien god and a violator of this strange morality. From 
time to time, as in the days of Leo X, of Louis XIV, and of 
Queen Anne, Aryanism, under the name of Paganism, openly 
and flagrantly set at naught the gods and the morals of the 
dominant religion. In our day the Hellenic conception of 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 45 

religion is profoundly modifying the Hebraic and, with an 
element neither Hellenic nor Hebraic, is combining to form 
a new conception of religion and to give new shapes to 
the gods. 



CHAPTER X 

The Twofold Destiny ot Zeus 

In the course of history the conception of Zeus in the 
minds of the people was changed both for the better and the 
worse. As time went on he became the god of the school;, 
and the god of the pothouse. Each of these changes was 
detrimental to his popularity and destructive of his influence 
as a god ; for the reason that the philosophers in the schools 
refined him beyond the reach of the common mind, while 
the priests in the temple and the poets in the pothouse de- 
" : m below the level of the common conscience. 
v>m a- very early period there was a tendency on the part 
-)i thinking men to put Zeus in a class by himself; for while 
me other divinities were gods, Zeus was, par excellence, The 
God. In him the divinities were unified. Homer calls Zeus 
"the father of gods and men." 

Monotheism is not so much a revelation as it is a logical 
necessity. The Hebrew prophet was not more monotheistic 
than was the Greek philosopher. Zeus, in the mind of the 
great thinker, became the Supreme if not the sole God in 
the physical universe, just as Jehovah, in the mind of the 
Hebrew, was greater than all gods. While Zeus was the 
father of gods and men, he was not, as in Christian theology, 
"the Creator of heaven and earth, the Maker of all things 
visible and invisible." Greek thought was incorrigibly pan- 
theistic; the world was ever older than gods or men. The 
substance of God, in the language of the schools, is antecedent 
to the person of God. "In Greek theology the universe was 



46 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

not the work of a pre-existing divinity, but rather the divin- 
ities were themselves evolved out of the pre-existing universe." 1 
But while Zeus was a creature born in time, he was, in the 
mind of the Greek, the Perfection of Creation, the First-born 
of the Godhead. 

The representations of Zeus, in the Pheidian period, are 
expressive of personal dignity, religious solemnity, intellectual 
power, moral restraint, and emotional poise. He is the ideal 
of Greek manhood as that ideal existed in the minds of such 
men as Plato, Pericles, and Pheidias. It is doubtful if man 
has ever surpassed this conception of divinity incarnate in 
humanity. 

At this point in his history Zeus had ceased to be the god 
of the leisure class and had become the god of a higher 
humanity; though he was still the god of the leisure class, 
in so much as this ideal of man was the ideal of the leisure 
class in its best estate and this artistic presentation the work 
of the leisure class. But in the Elian Zeus the leisure class 
is becoming conscious of something greater than itself. The 
eyes of Zeus are open to see all that concerns the life of man. 
His image of gold and ivory on the plain of Elis has for its 
background ages of human achievement. This god is be- 
coming too great to be the god of the leisure class only, he 
must, if he is to continue, become the god of all the world. 
And that is his destiny. Epictetus, the Greek slave, preaches 
him as the god of a common humanity to the senators of 
Rome. Philosophy refines Zeus into Theos and places him 
outside the bourne of time and space, in a region purely 
metaphysical. He ceases to be a person ; he becomes a prin- 
ciple. He is an object of thought rather than an object of 
worship, and has lost his place among the gods of the people 

But if Zeus was thus the victim of the philosopher and the 
theologian, he suffered more grievous wrong at the hands 
of the poets and actors. The poets recorded the escapades 
of the god, in his earlier period, in incomparable verse and 
made them immortal. By reason of this, the scandals of 
Olympus became the tittle-tattle of the street and were rolled 

1 "Cults of the Greek States," L. R. Farnell; vol. I, p. 48. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 47 

under the tongue of every Grecian man and woman. In erotic 
poetry, and on the stage, Zeus was exploited as the god who 
was guilty of the rape of Europa and of the seduction of 
Leda. His domestic quarrels were the delight of both gods 
and men, and he barely escaped the fate of the henpecked 
husband. 

These stories of the earlier period did not in that period 
injure Zeus in the estimation of his worshippers ; for they 
were in accord with the customs of the time. The Olympian 
gods of the poet are made in the fashion of the men of the 
later barbaric and the earlier civilized period. In that era 
the rape of women was an approved method of marriage, and 
their seduction not a crime but a virtue. In barbarism and 
early civilization women are wealth. They not only minister 
to the pleasure of man, they have also economic value ; by 
their labor in the house and the field they increased the 
riches of their master, and they had an exchangeable value; 
a man could trade his surplus women for gold, or silver, or 
precious stones. As a man does not care for that which 
costs him nothing, he set greater store on the women who 
resisted his advances and compelled him to rape them by 
his strength and purchase them with his money. The costly 
woman is always the desirable woman. In his earlier period 
the devotees of Zeus admired him for his virility and had a 
fellow-feeling with him in his efforts to reduce to subjection 
his wife Hera. Here, again, the poet reflects the opinion 
of his time. In the earlier period, while the Aryan is still 
migratory, the woman must live in the open and be on quasi- 
equality with man. The angry jealousy of Hera, resulting, 
as it did, in constant domestic broils, was the daily experience 
of the Aryan chieftain, and he thought none the less of the 
god because of the nagging of his wife. When he heard 
tell that Hera by her jealous fury had disturbed the peace 
of Olympus, the Aryan man shrugged his shoulders and re- 
marked : "Just like a woman!" and let it go at that. 

But with the passing of time came the changing of custom. 
The rape and the seduction of women were no longer a sign 
of manly virtue. Among the leisure class refinement had 



48 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

made the coarseness of the earlier age intolerable. The mys- 
teries of the human body were no longer exposed to vulgar 
sight, the clothing of the body brought with it the sense of 
shame. What men and women had once spoken of openly 
they now veiled behind the decent phrase. What in the 
earlier period was ordinary speech and action became in the 
later time vulgarity and obscenity. There are certain func- 
tions of human living that demand the strictest privacy, and 
the man who performs these in the open or speaks of them 
without disguise is a vulgar, obscene fellow, unfit for polite 
society. 

It is also the misfortune of the gods, even more than of 
men, that the follies of their youth are the plague of their 
age. Their gaitcheries, preserved by the poets, lower them 
in the esteem of each succeeding generation, as men and 
women grow into the decencies and refinements of life. And 
when, as in the case of Zeus and the other Olympian divin- 
ities, these stories are dramatized and become the staple of 
the theater ; when the gods become the laughter of the pit 
and the derision of the gallery ; when they are used to excite 
the vulgar passions and to satisfy the prurient imagination, 
then these gods cannot long survive the ridicule and contempt 
of the chaste and the sober-minded. Sooner or later a moral 
reaction is sure to sweep them out of their heaven and con- 
sign them to the darkness and damnation of perdition. 

This was the fate of Zeus. When the great moral reaction 
came, the Zeus of the philosophers and the schools could not 
save the Zeus of the poets and the playwrights. As a result 
of that moral reaction, Zeus lost his primacy, and the title 
of Supreme Being in the Western world passed to the god 
of an alien dynasty. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 49 



CHAPTER XI 

Athena: Goddess of the Implicit Reason 

Next in importance to Zeus in the religious history of the 
Greeks was Athena, the titular divinity and the name saint 
of the greatest of the city states of the Grecian civilization. 
In Athens Grecian civilization flowered, fruited, and seeded, 
and from thence the seeds of that civilization were scattered 
far and wide on the winds of chance, to reproduce its thoughts, 
its feelings, its culture, in the uttermost parts of the earth. 

Culture is native to Athens ; there the human intelligence 
first became conscious of itself, and the cultivation of that 
intelligence for its own sake the serious occupation of the 
higher order of man. It was in Athens that men were first 
called philosophers, — lovers of wisdom; and of wisdom Athena 
was the embodiment and the patron. She was symbolic of 
pure reason ; her mind was soul ; she was intuitive in her 
processes of mentality; she did not think, she felt. 

Athena was the wisdom of the Greeks manifesting that 
conception of life which was the soul in the body of Hellenic 
civilization. Her wisdom was manifested by the method she 
used to acquire her supremacy in the city of her choice. As 
the story goes : When the city of Athens was not yet founded 
but was a plan in the minds of the gods, Poseidon contended 
with Athena for the patronage of the city. It was decreed 
by the judges that the protection of the city should be in 
the keeping of that divinity who should bring to the cradle 
of the infant community the most useful gift. Poseidon, 
the god of the sea, came first, bringing as his gift a horse, 
and after him came Athena with an olive tree. When Pos- 
eidon saw the little gnarled tree in the hands of Athena he 
laughed it to scorn, and all the gods laughed with him. 

"Is not this," cried the Sea God, "just like a woman? Do 
you not know, O daughter of Zeus, that the Grecian men have 
been of old hunters and fighters? on my horse this city will 
ride forth to the conquest of the world !" 

And all the gods answered : "Amen." 



50 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Then Athena courtesied in the presence of the gods and 
said: 

"What you say, O son of Chronos, is true : Grecian men 
have been of old fighters and hunters, they rode on horses 
in the chase of flying men and beasts. But what men have 
been, men will not be. Human nature changes. Here on 
this hill a new civilization is coming to the birth. Here 
men will cease to fight, and learn to think. They will burn 
the oil of the olive in their lamps, and through the long 
nights will study the wisdom of the gods. This City will 
make conquest of the world ; men of all ages and all countries 
will bow in her courts, drawn thither not by the renown of 
her wars, but by the glory of her arts. She will light with 
the oil of the olive the torch that will enlighten the world; 
men will learn from her the folly of war as a means of ascend- 
ency of man over man. Let us leave to coarser natures the 
physical conquest of the world, while we are content to rule 
in and over the thoughts of men. Because of this, O Holy 
Gods, I bring to the cradle of this new-born civilization the 
leaf of the olive as the symbol of peace and the oil of the 
olive as the source of light." 

Then all the gods rose up and bowed before Athena and 
by unanimous vote, — Poseidon alone objecting, — proclaimed 
Athena the patron of the city, which was called after her 
name. 

So runs the story of the foundation of Athens. Let him 
who has faith in the gods believe. 

But this wise goddess knew that man does not change 
his nature in a night. Only little by little does he put off 
the old man and put on the new. As he had been a man of 
war from his youth, a hunter and a fighter by the habit of 
ages, it was not to be expected that he would at once disarm 
and expose himself without a weapon to the insolence of his 
enemies. The new civilization of the spirit must grow up 
under the protection of the old civilization of the sword. Be- 
cause of the hardness of the hearts of men, the violence of 
war must be. 

So Athena, being practical as well as the goddess of pure 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 51 

reason, recognized this necessity of war for the time being 
and took it, with all the other interests of Athens, under 
her protection ; thus becoming the war goddess of the Ath- 
enian worship ; her sign, the helmet and spear. When the 
safety of her city demands it she does not hesitate to put on 
her helmet and take up her spear. Men think it strange 
to-day that women are militant. As if they had not always 
been militant, — fierce fighters for the safety of their young! 
In the migratory days, if the men were defeated in battle, 
the women died in defense of the camp. Caesar in his wars 
with the Germans had to reckon with the women as well as 
with the men. They were ready to kill and be killed until 
the last one perished on the field of battle. In the course 
of the Gallic wars Caesar killed over a million men and women, 
the number of women being almost equal to that of the men. 
In our day women are fighting for political, social, and 
industrial equality with every weapon upon which they can 
lay hand, and the men are powerless because they do not dare 
to kill the women. They cry : "These women are furies !" 
and the women answer them: "You are right, we are furies; 
we have always been furies in defense of the rights of our 
children. You men have built up a civilization based upon 
violence. You have reduced women to subjection by viol- 
ence ; as it suits your convenience you use her or leave her, 
you make of her your slave in your factories, growing rich 
upon her unrequited labor. It is by violence that you main- 
tain the inequalities and inequities of your civilization, and 
by violence we will destroy them." In this contention the 
women have the approval of the goddess Athena, who, when 
the battle was going against her side on the field of Troy, did 
not hesitate to leap upon the chariot and drive into the midst 
of the fray and win a victory over Ares, the god of war. 

In the person of Athena, woman is a ruler in the state : 
she sits at the council board, where she discusses and decides 
questions of war and peace. The saying that woman's sphere 
is in the home is true of her as of all women, because the 
city is her home. The notion that you can take a woman 
and shut her up in a house, away from the general life of the 



52 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

state, is the thought of men in the times of their degeneracy. 
In all great crises of political history the women, with the 
men, conduct the affairs of State. The greatest periods in 
English history are the ages of Elizabeth, Anne, and Victoria. 

Athena was not a virgin goddess in the sense that Artemis 
and Mary were virgin. Her womanhood is but an accident 
not of the substance of her nature. She is in reality neither 
male nor female, but the blending of both in a perfect hu- 
manity. She is a woman because womanhood is the stronger 
element in human nature. Athena is not a lover of men 
because she is a lover of man. She is not and cannot be 
the mother of a family, because she is the mother of a city, 
— the nurse of a civilization. She is the goddess of the dawn, 
ever fresh and pure and strong. She lies alone at night and 
goes forth alone in the morning. She is the prototype of that 
great company of women who, in all ages, have risen above 
sex into a sexless humanity; who have fed from the fountains 
of their love not the children of their womb but the children 
of their time; who have been mothers but not wives, and 
of whom it is written : "More are the children of the desolate 
than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord." 

As an object of worship, Athena inspired the noblest art 
by which man has ever wrought to the glory of his god. 
Her temple, the Parthenon, stands to this day unsurpassed 
and unsurpassable, the brightest expression in the form of 
building that man has given of his conception of the divine. 
This temple has nothing of the extravagance (shall I say?) 
of the insanity of the architecture of the Gothic period ; its 
keynote is serenity. The mystery of life is subordinated 
to the mastery of life. Here is so much of the mystery that 
we have mastered. Here is the length of it; here is the 
breadth of it ; here it stands on its rock foundation ; the sky 
is over it; the earth is beneath it; the sky may be deeper and 
the earth wider but this much of space we have made our 
own. Here we have built a house for our god, this is our 
place in the universe, and with it we are content. Beyond 
us greater worlds may lie, but neither the fear of them nor 
the hope of them can disturb our serenity. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 53 

Dr. Farnell in his interesting and valuable work, "The 
Cults of the Greek States," tells us that the origin of the name 
Athena is unknown. He deprecates any effort on the part 
of philologists to trace it to any language antecedent to the 
Greek, holding all such efforts misleading and harmful to 
true scholarship. This position of Dr. Farnell is the antithesis 
of that taken by Max Miiller and his school, who were apt to 
find all the gods of the later age in the records of the earlier 
periods. The study of the Sanscrit and the mastery of the 
sacred literature of India gave these scholars, as they thought, 
the key that opened the door to a better understanding of 
Western religion. Doubtless there were many fanciful and 
extravagant uses of this method, and relations were found 
where relations did not exist. But for all that I think the 
philologist has been helpful to the mythologist, and to discard 
this aid altogether is going from one extreme to the other. 

Notwithstanding the criticism of Dr. Farnell, I am inclined 
to identify the A-'thena of the Greeks with the Ahana of the 
earlier Sanscrit period. Ahana was the breath of the morning, 
springing from the brow of Dyaus and blowing away the 
mists that hide him from the earth. I am fond to think 
that when the Aryan migrated from East to West Ahana 
went before him, and after marching all the night over the 
land, or rowing over the sea, when morning came and he 
saw the great rock, which is the Acropolis of Athens, and 
felt upon his brow the cooling breeze, he bowed his head 
and worshipped, saying: "It is Ahana." And there he Suilt 
his city, consecrating it to the freshness of the dawn. 

When the day of Grecian civilization declined and the night 
came on, when the temple of Athena was broken down, her 
altar deserted, her name forgotten, the goddess did not cease 
to be, she only changed her form. Losing the last vestige 
of sex, she reappears the most mysterious of the gods of the 
succeeding age known as To Hagion Pneuma, — The Holy Air; 
the Spirit of the Living God, — proceeding from Him as the 
Breath of the Eternal Morning, for the inspiration and the 
purification of the children of men. 



54 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XII 

Phoebus Apollo: The God of the Explicit Reason 

Zeus, the father of gods and men, had many sons, of whom 
Phoebus Apollo was by far the most distinguished. Like 
many another notable person, he was born out of wedlock. 
Leto, his mother, was not the wife but the mistress of Zeus. 
Inflamed by her beauty, the god compelled her submission. 
In this, as in all like cases, the woman paid. Hera, the wife 
of Zeus, discovering the intrigue, determined that the ill- 
begotten brat of this woman should not be born within the 
precincts of Olympus, nor upon any land under the sky. In 
jealous rage she stirred up Python to pursue Leto from coun- 
try to country. The dread of the anger of Hera compelled 
the people to refuse to the expectant mother the hospitality 
that she so sorely needed. She fled from the devouring 
dragon until she came to Delos, an island that until then 
was hidden under the water, floating from place to place ; but 
taking pity upon the victim of the gods, it rose above the 
water, fastened itself to the bottom of the sea, and gave 
asylum to the laboring woman. There, after a nine days' 
travail, Leto was delivered of twins, Apollo and Artemis, 
divinities of the Sun and the Moon. 

As soon as he was born, Apollo was fed by Thetis with 
the nectar and ambrosia of the gods ; when he had eaten he 
grew apace into manhood, asserted his divinity, and pro- 
claimed his mission, which was to teach to men the ways of 
his father Zeus. Setting forth upon this enterprise, the 
earth welcomed him with the blooming of flowers and the 
singing of birds. Men came to his shrine with offerings, 
and the gods welcomed him to Olympus. He was received 
by the celestial company into the ranks of the major gods, 
and from that moment he sat at the right hand of Zeus his 
father, and from this throne reigned over the religious life 
of the Greeks. 

This is the story of the origin of Apollo as it is told by 
the poets. Just how much truth there is in it I cannot say, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 55 

nor do I care to unravel its symbolism and make plain its 
hidden meaning. But this we know : Apollo was a god of 
the middle period of the Greek mythological age. He did 
not come with the Aryan from the Sanscrit land, nor was 
he found by them in Greece at the time of the first and second 
invasions. Therefore, he is either a product of Greek inven- 
tion or he is an importation from Syria and Egypt. Some 
say that he is the Sun god and only another name for Helios, 
while others assert that he is not the symbol of any of the 
physical phenomena of nature but is wholly spiritual, — a de- 
cided advance on all the gods who came before him. The 
greater number of authorities are inclined to the Sun-god 
theory, and my own thought goes that way. Nor does this 
derogate from the spirituality of the god ; for what is the 
Sun but the spirit of fire, forever burning and never con- 
sumed? Apollo is the Sun as the regulator of life, the des- 
troyer of evil, the giver of health, the revealer of mysteries 
and the teacher of the truth of fact, as against Athena, who 
is the inspirer of truth of feeling. But let one take which- 
ever theory of the origin of Apollo that may commend itself 
to his judgment, yet one must agree, I think, with Dr. Smith 
when he sa}^s, concluding his article, in the "Dictionary of 
Mythology," relating to Apollo : 

"Whatever we think of this and other modes of explaining 
the origin and nature of Apollo; his worship, his festivals 
and his oracles had more influence on the Greeks than any 
other god. It may be safely asserted that the Greeks would 
never have become what they were without the worship ol 
Apollo ; in him the brightest side of the Grecian mind is 
reflected." 

In Apollo the gods are lifted above the passion of man 
for woman. Whatever children he had, if any, are not the 
children of his loins but the children of his soul. Asclepios 
is sometimes called the son of Apollo, but Apollo had neither 
wife nor mistress, and Asclepios was his son by spiritual 
generation. 



56 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

It was the mission of Apollo to destroy evil in the world. 
He brought to light the secret murder and adultery and 
visited upon the offender the consequences of his crime. The 
wrath of Apollo was the dread that staid the crime. It was, 
however, the pleasure of the god to prevent rather than to 
punish crime, to forestall rather than to cure sickness. In 
him was the healing power of the Sun-light in which if a man 
lives, he can be neither sickly nor wicked. 

But far more important than the prevention or the punish- 
ment of crime, of far more consequence to the world than the 
forestalling or cure of sickness, was the gift of prophecy pos- 
sessed by the god. It was this that gave him his power and 
place in Greek religion. His oracle at Delphi was consulted 
by the Greeks, both in private and public affairs. Nothing 
of importance was done without first hearing what the god 
had to say about it. Statesmen waited on this oracle, mer- 
chants sailed at his word, and lovers mated at his bidding. 
We may laugh at his oracular speech and say that each man 
received from the god the answer that he wanted for his 
question, but our laughter is the laughter of fools. In waiting 
for the oracle of the gods, man waited for his own second 
thought, and so waiting, was the wiser. In Apollo man ad- 
vanced from impulse to reason as a guide of action. The 
god prophesied of things to come, and by his prophesy made 
his future obedient to his present. Only he laughs at Apollo 
who has never listened to the voice of the god, telling him 
what to do and what not to do. The god may sometimes 
make a mistake, but it is better to suffer the mistakes of 
the gods than the consequences of our own folly. The Del- 
phic oracle may require interpretation, but to interpret the 
thought of a god is better than to trust to one's own shal- 
lowness. 

The sign of Apollo was the lyre. He was the god of 
harmony and melody, — the principle of order in the world. 
The universe in which man lives is harmonious ; it is in tune 
with itself. Its motions must be rhythmic, if life is to be 
happy. Harmony is more than the basis of music, it is the 
eternal song sung by the morning stars. Music, like the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 57 

soul of gods and men, is neither in time nor in space, but it 
measures time and is heard in space. When the soul is fully 
developed, it is a note, or a half-note, or a quarter-note in 
the eternal score that the god of music is writing to tell all 
the joy, the pathos, the passion of living. 

Apollo is the god of order, in contradistinction to the god 
of law. Law and order are not words, as some suppose, 
identical in meaning. Law is from without, order is from 
within; law is command, order is habit. When there is law 
there is as yet no perfect order; where there is order there 
is no need for law. In the great unconscious nature of the 
gods order prevails and habit rules. We speak of the 
laws of nature, and by so speaking create a confusion of 
tnought, as if there were somewhere in nature a Congress 
assembled, with its Senate and House of Representatives, 
making laws for nature to obey: or some Tsar issuing his 
ukase commanding the obedience of the world. But that is 
not the system that obtains in nature. 

Nature knows no laws. She is the creature of her habits , 
sne follows custom, and custom is the source of order. Law 
may lead to order, but it is not order until custom has made 
the law unnecessary. In human society are many laws and 
little order. Human society will be at unity with itself when 
justice, mercy, and truth are the habits of society as har- 
monic movement is the habit of the waves of sound. Not 
until men do not need government can government be suc- 
cessful. When Apollo reigns in the heart as well as in the 
ear, then and then only will human society be a harmony 
and not a discord in the ears of the gods. 

Apollo was to the Greeks the god of the explicit reason 
in speech as well as in music. It was his art to make music 
audible and speech understandable. Athena was the god- 
dess of the pure reason, Apollo the god of reason expressing 
itself in thoughts and explaining its thought in language. 
It was the devotion of the Greek to this god of the explicit 
reason that has given him his place in the life of the world. 
The demand of Apollo was for cleanness and clearness of 
thought; so cleanness and clearness of thought was the ab- 



58 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

sorbing passion of the Greek thinker. In his struggle for 
the attainment of this virtue, he elaborated the one perfect 
language ever spoken by man ; he studied the order of think- 
ing and formulated it into a science. Grammar and logic 
and geometry are by-products of the Grecian passion for 
intellectual clarity. Socrates, the greatest of the Greeks, 
was the prophet of clarity ; with his keen dialectic he dissected 
the sophistries of the men of his time and compelled them 
to think clearly, — if they would think at all. 

This passion of the Greeks for intellectual clarity has made 
the world their debtors till the end of time. When we invent 
the telegraph, the telephone, we go to the Greeks for the 
name of our invention. So essential to human thinking has 
the Greek made his language and his literature that it is to- 
day necessary to culture. One who has had no acquaintance 
with the speech of Plato and St. John is wanting in one of 
the elements that go to make up the equipment of the cul- 
tured man. One may get along without it, but one would 
get along a great deal better with it. However, even if one 
cannot read the language, one has it to-day within one's 
reach and one is greatly to blame if one is not acquainted 
with the mode of the Grecian mind. Chapman's Homer is 
better than no Homer at all, and Jowett's Plato is almost 
equal to Plato himself. One must not forego Grecian culture, 
even though one cannot read Greek. 

It is true that the Greeks cultivated the explicit reason 
at the expense of implicit reason, they became more attentive 
to the form of thought than to the substance of thought. 
This passion for clarity led them to explain their explana- 
tions until their method of reasoning was its own destruction. 
The Greeks were always on the verge of the great discoveries 
of modern science. As early as Pythagoras they had asserted 
the rotundity and revolution of the earth, they were acquainted 
with the phenomena of electricity. They failed to follow 
these lines of discovery because their itch for argument 
hindered the cultivation of the powers of observation. 

But what of that? Has not the Greek, in cultivating clarity, 
in giving us logic and grammar and music and sculpture and 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 59 

architecture, done enough for us? If he had gone on and 
made all the discoveries that have been the glory of our time, 
what, pray, would have been left for us to do? Let us be 
content with what he did, and thankful for what he did 
not do. 

The sculptors of Greece made Apollo the embodiment of 
the notion that man is a spiritual being, — his body the crea- 
tion of his soul. When we look at the Apollo Belvedere 
we are impressed by the mentality and spirituality of the 
figure ; the Avide forehead, the deep eyes, the firm jaw, and 
square chin are indicative of intellectual power under the 
control of a strong will, directed by a high moral purpose. 
The physical elements are everywhere subordinated to the 
mentality and spirituality of the man. But there is nothing 
of Eastern ascetism in the figure. The body is full, strong, 
and graceful, — under control, but not enslaved. The soul ot 
Apollo was not afraid of his body. In him we find that per- 
fect balance, that sane mind in a sound body which was the 
ideal of the Grecian religion. Take him for all in all, Apollo 
was about as fine a god as men have ever worshipped. He was 
of the Emersonian type, — calm, equable, sure of himself, 
and sure of the universe. We need in our day to cultivate 
the worship of Apollo, to mould the crudeness of our sub- 
stance to the perfection of his form, to bring into our mighty 
but noisy and vulgar civilization the harmony of his lyre and 
the melody of his lute. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Aphrodite: The Goddess of Desire 

Primitive religious thought, or feeling, differs from the 
modern in nothing so much as in its attitude toward the 
great fact of reproduction. Man living in the Eden of innocent 
unconsciousness was naked and not ashamed ; he had not yet 



60 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

come to think of his origin as degraded and dishonorable ; 
ne saw that in Nature sex relationship gave rise to wonderful 
and beautiful phenomena. This relationship gave fragrance 
and color to the plant, plumage and song to the bird; beard 
and strength to the man, fairness and gracefulness to the 
woman. The cycle of changes consequent upon the advent 
of reproductive power are so wonderful that they could not 
escape observation. Primitive man looked upon and wor- 
shipped this secret force of nature as divine. 

In phalic worship, its coarsest physical elements and func- 
tions were the direct objects of adoration. That which with 
us is hidden out of sight and never so much as mentioned 
was to the primitive man as open to the view and as much 
a matter of remark as eating and drinking. He may have 
been, — and doubtless was, — less delicate, less refined than are 
we, but it does not follow that he was less virtuous. Re- 
finement and virtue are often in inverse ratio to each other. 
The court of Louis XIV was most refined, but the less said 
about its virtue the better. 

In the earlier period of human history, as in the animal 
world, the male element was the controlling element in sexual 
selection. It is the male bird that has the plumage and the 
voice; it is the lion and not the lioness that has the lionine 
strength and beauty. True, in many species the male and 
female differ so slightly that we never think of one more 
than the other as embodying the principle of sex, but this is 
the exception not the rule. When we think of sex in the 
animal world we think of the cock, the bull, and the stallion, 
not of the hen, the cow, or the mare. And, without doubt, 
this was true in the primitive times of man. Man served 
little or no other purpose in savage and early barbarian times 
than that of the male of the species. Nature used him for 
purposes of propagation only. He was as useful and as use- 
less as a cock in the barnyard, as a bull in the pasture. His 
relation to reproduction was accidental and momentary; he 
was free to roam and live his own life, which he did, and as 
a consequence he developed his individuality, his physique, 
and his mentality faster than woman. Manly strength, with 



THE WAYS OP THE GODS 61 

its perfection of form, is antecedent to womanly grace and 
beauty. It is so to-day : the boy is a finer looking creature 
at twelve or thirteen than is a girl at the same age; and in 
the working class the men as a rule are better looking than 
the women. 

The reason for this is that the woman could not in the 
natural order (and cannot to-day in the working class) live 
her own life. She is the economic factor in reproduction: 
she must feed her young at first with her blood and then 
with her milk and then with the labor of her hands. Her 
motherhood absorbs her individuality and arrests her develop- 
ment. If any one doubt this, let him look at the average 
woman and the average man ; at the workingwoman and the 
workingman. 

Among the civilized people of the higher class this relation 
of the male to the female has suffered a subtle and radical 
change. It is the female and not the male that we think of 
when we have in mind the phenomena of sex. In the ruling 
and leisure class woman is sex, and she is little else : the end 
of a princess is to be a princess, to marry a prince, and give 
birth to a prince. Until recently the life of a woman of this 
class has been considered wholly as relative to man. The 
sex idea dominates her life from the beginning to the end ; 
she is a virgin, or a wife, or a widow, or an old maid, or 
spinster, and never simply a woman. As a consequence of 
this change, the woman in the upper class has been differen- 
tiated from the man in a manner unknown to the earlier 
stages of society. 

This radical change is the result of economic conditions ; 
the same conditions that have brought about the accumula- 
tion of wealth and the establishment of the leisure class. 
Womanly grace and beauty are the products of leisure ; to 
this all the poets bear witness. The shepherdess, who is 
the type of rustic beauty, has a leisurely occupation ; Blousy- 
Linda the bar-maid, with her red cheeks and her short-lived 
beauty, belongs for the time being to the more leisurely of 
the working class. It is, however, in the leisure class itself 
that the beautiful woman is at home and prized. Her delicacy 



62 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

is in direct proportion to the care that is bestowed upon her 
and her freedom from care ; her hands must not be calloused 
by toil, her back must not be bent by burdens, nor her feet 
blistered by travel. If one stops to consider, one will find 
that one always associates womanly beauty with a life of 
leisure. 

The ancient Greek religion expressed this fact in the wor- 
ship of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Aphrodite had 
nothing to commend her but her beauty ; she was born without 
travail from the sea-foam, flowers sprang up for her without 
the labor of cultivation; she is drawn in a chariot by doves; 
she has nothing to do the livelong day but to be beautiful. 
Cupid, her boy, is naked ; her mother does not have to clothe 
him. All that is told us of Aphrodite reminds us of the life 
of the woman of leisure class in all periods of civilization: 
she is really the product par excellence of civilization. 

She lives by the exercise of her sex power. No sooner 
does Aphrodite come into the presence of the gods than 
every man god desires her and every woman god hates her. 
Ares, the war god, is caught in the meshes of her beauty. 
11 era and even Athena are wild with jealousy. 

Aphrodite is the goddess of desire, she is love for the pleas- 
ures of love; in her the pleasure is separated from the duty. 
Men choose her not as the mother of their children but as 
the companion of their idle hours. Man departed most widely 
from nature when he made the pleasure of love the end of 
love. Nature inspires desire only at the mating season. The 
function of sex is strictly limited to reproduction. Man, 
through the conscious exercise of his powers, has been able 
to overcome nature; and it is this fact that has made the 
life of man the shameful thing that in some respects it is. 
When in any great function of nature the pleasure attendant 
upon the function is separated from the purpose of the func- 
tion, disaster follows. When one eats for the sake of eating, 
or drinks for the sake of drinking, then we have the glutton 
and the drunkard. Only man can be guilty of these vices, 
and far more disastrous is the separation of the pleasure of 
loving from the function of reproduction. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 63 

The worship of Aphrodite, the goddess of desire, is always 
dangerous to man. The Greeks so recognized it. They 
married Aphrodite to Hephaiston, the lame blacksmith of 
Olympus, to show that pleasure must be subordinated to duty. 
When Ares is caught with Aphrodite by Hephaiston all 
Olympus laughs in derision. Her amours are entertaining 
but not ennobling. 

As the goddess of beauty Aphrodite is the inspiration of 
artists, as the Venus di Milo testifies ; as the goddess of desire 
she is the dread of the moralist, who sees in her the wreckage 
of life. 

Her worship is not that of sex power but of sex pleasure. 
It was this worship of sex as the source of pleasure that was 
the canker worm of ancient civilization; it led to unnamable 
vice, to the corruption of youth, and to the degradation of 
age. Wherever civilization accumulates wealth, and gives 
rise to a class of idle rich, there this disease of civilization 
is engendered. Every man and every woman is in danger 
of infection. With us, in our highly congested civilization 
and crowded cities, this evil is threatening the very fabric 
of our social life. 

But there is a true as well as a false worship of Aphrodite. 
A woman has a right to be beautiful, — beauty is the desire 
of the gods. The love of beauty is in every star and every 
snowflake. Theologians find in man's sense of beauty the 
proof of the existence of God ; ugliness being always associated 
with the devil, beauty with the Divine. In desiring beauty, 
woman desires a good thing. Civilization may well pride 
itself on the production of the beautiful woman, she is indeed 
the goddess under whose feet the flowers spring up, and 
at whose coming the birds sing. We want not fewer beauti- 
ful women but more. Life should be so ordained that beau- 
tiful women should be not the exception but the rule. We 
have no natural right to shut young girls up in factories and 
in stores and condemn them to lives of ugliness. Beauty 
should be the right of many, not the privilege of the few. 

It would seem after all these ages that some plan of living 
might be devised that would make it possible for all men 



64 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

to be vigorous and all women to be beautiful ; with our 
improved means of production there might be sufficient lei- 
sure for all to grow in grace and loveliness. The world as 
it is to-day is a horror of ugliness. The ancients may have 
sinned in their worship of beauty, but we certainly sin in the 
tolerance of its opposite. We love ugly buildings and ugly 
streets and ugly men and women. I live on the banks of a 
lovely river, which the gods went out of their way to make 
beautiful, — a river we have made hideous beyond all recog- 
nition by the cinder heaps from our breweries, and the purity 
of whose waters we have defiled by our sewage. Even if it 
is dangerous, we need a revival of the worship of beauty for 
beauty's sake, that we may escape from the ugliness of our 
own creating. 

The worship of Aphrodite is the declaration on the part 
of the Greek religion that nature has associated pleasure with 
the functioning of life. Eating and drinking and loving are 
all pleasurable, or ought to be. It is wrong to deny these 
pleasures to millions of living creatures; there is something 
rotten in our social state when multitudes of women are 
denied the pleasures of love, or must enjoy them secretly, 
as if they were a crime. We are still far from social perfec- 
tion when such things are possible. 

We do not want Venus worshipped in the world again ; 
but we do want the worship of love. Love which romanticism 
makes the basis of marriage is impossible in the modern 
world, only because economic conditions make it impossible. 
When both men and women are economically independent 
then love for love's sake will be possible again. The mar- 
riage relation and the love relation should be coeval. Chil- 
dren born of a loveless union had best never be born at all. 
All our children should be like Leonardo da Vinci, — love 
children. 

In all that relates to the regulation of the man to the 
woman and the woman to the man we are at the beginning 
of a new evolutionary era which, as we are wise or unwise, 
will lead to a lower and a meaner, or to a higher and a nobler, 
way of living. We cannot afford any longer to hate, despise, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 65 

and 'gnore the method of our birth. The worship of Aph- 
rodite has in it an element of truth : desire is desirable. 
Children should be born of desire on the part of both the man 
and the woman, or they should not be born at all. Our world 
is overcrowded with the feeble spawn of loveless unions. 
It would be better if the quantity were less, and the quality 
improved. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Ares: The God of War 

It is to the credit of the Aryan religion, in its best estate, 
that it held the God of War in low esteem. This divinity has 
attained to the first rank only in one branch of the Aryan 
people, and that the most barbaric. 

In Greece and Rome during the classic period the war 
god was subject to the control of the divinities that repre- 
sented the civil, intellectual, and emotional interests of the 
city. Neither Zeus nor Jupiter was primarily a god of war. 
They, as rulers of the State, were consulted as to the safety 
of the State, and war was made with their consent when the 
interests of the State demanded war; but war for war's sake 
was abhorrent to these mighty gods. 

Ancient civilization was necessarily militant; for it was 
engaged in a constant struggle with antecedent and sur- 
rounding barbarism, and with lower forms of civilized life. 
The lower civilizations of Asia were a constant menace to the 
higher civilization of Greece; the barbarians were always at 
the gates of Rome. 

But neither Greece nor Rome, though constantly at war, 
ever loved war for its own sake ; war was necessary, but it 
was regarded as a necessary evil, Goldwin Smith advanced 
the paradoxical proposition that the Romans were successful 
in war, not because they were the most warlike, but because 



66 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

they were the least warlike people of their age and vicinage. 
The Roman went to war not as a pleasure but as a duty, 
not as a pastime but as a business ; his wars were wars with 
a purpose. It was not the army of the Roman, it was his 
civil organization that gave him preeminence and the mas- 
tery of the world. 

The Greek civilization was short-lived because it unduly, 
and perhaps unwisely, subordinated the fighting man to the 
philosopher and the artist. Its great men are its thinkers, 
its poets, its sculptors, and its architects, not its generals. 
It was perhaps well for the world but bad for Greece that 
Socrates is more famous than Themistocles, Plato than Mil- 
tiades. The triumph of Greece over Asia is the triumph of 
the higher intelligence over the lower; nor was it the brute 
strength of the Macedonian soldiers but the high spirit of 
Alexander that gave him the victory on the fields of Issus 
and Arbela. 

Caesar was the greatest pure intelligence that ever applied 
itself to the problems of war, and yet war was not Caesar's 
forte ; he was essentially a man of the council chamber, the 
study, and the forum. He could write and speak better than 
he could fight. He never lost an opportunity to make a 
blunder in war, but when he made a blunder he had the intel- 
ligence to see it before his adversary could take advantage of 
it and to utilize his mistake to the destruction of his enemies. 

Both in Rome and in Greece, during the classic period of 
their history, war was undertaken with reluctance for pur- 
poses of state, and regretted as hindering the development 
of the higher life of the people. 

All this is reflected in the religion of the period. Ares, 
the God of War, does not hold a place of dignity in the 
Olympian dynasty; he is there on toleration only; no beauti- 
ful myths surround his birth ; he is the prosaic, lawful son 
of Zeus and Hera, — the product of a loveless union. His 
parents dislike him because of his rude manners and his 
savage turn of mind. To the Greek, Ares represents the 
horrors of war, the slaughter of men, the rape of woman, the 
burning of cities, the wasting of fields. He is huge, and as 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 67 

foolish as he is big. Aphrodite ensnares him, and Hephaiston 
takes him in the snare. He is the ridicule of Olympus as 
he struts about in his helmet, dangling his sword. 

While Athena is the goddess of war as subordinated to 
civic necessity, inspired by moral purpose and directed by 
intelligence to a speedy and just conclusion, Ares is the 
God of War for war's sake. He is a swashbuckler, a jingo 
of the jingoes, to him war is pastime, the piping times of 
peace a weariness. On the field of battle he gloats over the 
dead ; on the night of the battle he rapes the women of the 
vanquished ; he applies the torch to the houses of the cities, 
and tramples down the growing grain. Ares is war as a 
destructive force ; Athena war as a corrective, regenerating 
force. Athena is with Caesar civilizing Gaul, Ares is with 
Gengis Khan devastating Europe; Athena fights at Salamis; 
Ares at Borodino. 

The only branch of the Aryan race that has given the chief 
place to the God of War is the Teutonic, in which are found 
the last invaders and the present occupants of northern and 
middle Europe. The Teuton, when he entered upon the con- 
quest of the Roman Empire, had a vigorous, native intelli- 
gence in a low state of cultivation. While his kindred, the 
Persians, the Greeks, and the Latins had made their home 
in the regions of the earth most favorable to the progress of 
mankind, — regions where were the great water courses, the 
open sea, rich valleys, and fruitful hills ; where the sun was 
bright and the skies were blue ; where the summer was long 
and the winter short, it was the fate of the Teuton to lose his 
way in the hypoborean forests of the north, where he struggled 
for existence with the darkness and the cold, and competed 
with the wolf and the bear for his place in the sun. This 
northern forest held the Teuton in its savage grasp almost 
down to our own times. He was at the beginning of our 
era without letters, without art, without science. The men 
of the Teutonic people were war-men ; when there was no 
war these war-men or Ger-men had no occupation except 
to eat, which they did to gluttony, and to drink, which they 
did to drunkenness. 



68 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The chief god of the Teutons was naturally the War God, 
called Woden, or Goden. By day this god was out killing; 
at night he was at home eating and drinking. This is the 
god of their fathers who still rules the heart and guides the 
life of the Teutonic people. War for war's sake is at this 
writing engaging the thought and consuming the energies 
of Europe. The civilization that the Teuton acquired from 
the Greeks and the Romans, the religion that he adopted 
from the Hebrews, the gods of culture, and the Prince of 
Peace are swept aside by the fierce strength of the German 
war god. Woden is in his Valhalla, drinking the blood of 
his enemies from the skulls of the slain. Ares roars; Athena 
weeps. 



CHAPTER XV 

Demeter: The Mother of Sorrows 

The myths of the ancient world, though the work of the 
primitive imagination, are, like many a modern novel, founded 
on fact. Myth is history written in hieroglyphic. 

The story of Demeter is reminiscent of the fact that the 
human race owes the institution of agriculture to the woman. 
She first discovered the power of the seed, invented a plow, 
and cultivated the land. All early religions put agriculture 
in the care of a goddess and not of a god. To woman, civil- 
ization owes three of its greatest achievements : the domes- 
tication of animals (except, perhaps, the horse and the dog), 
the capture of fire, and the institution of agriculture as the 
chief source of food supply. But for these achievements, the 
human race would never have passed over from savagery into 
barbarism, from barbarism into civilization. 

Demeter was not as Rhea, the goddess of the earth, she 
was the goddess of the plowed field. She was Mother Earth : 
Earth prepared for and fructified by the seed. She gave 
mother love to the children of her bosom. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 69 

"Her care brought the gentle rain and kept off the blight. 
The poppies which dotted the fields with color were her gifts, 
but the harvest time was the time of her glory. In the stand- 
ing grain and the gathered sheaves she was present ; over 
the cutting, the threshing, and the grinding of the corn she 
presided ; the first new loaves of bread were consecrated to 
her. So closely was she identified with the grain that in 
all the worship of the farm she took first place." * 

But if the harvest was the time of her glory, it was also 
the beginning of her sorrow. By the harvest the children 
were taken from her, and after the harvest she was widowed 
and childless, her fields were desolate, and the fountains of 
her life were frozen in the hills. Then Demeter, clothed in 
sackcloth, was like Rachel in Rama weeping for her children 
and refusing to be comforted because they are not. 

As the story goes, Persephone, her daughter, was, without 
her knowledge, given by Zeus to his brother Hades, — the 
dread lord of the underworld. 

"One September day when the youthful Persephone was 
gathering roses and lilies, crocuses and violets, hyacinths and 
narcissus in a lush meadow, the earth gaped, and Hades, lord 
of the dead issuing from the abyss, carried her off on his 
golden car to be his bride and queen in the gloomy subter- 
ranean world/' 2 

Then the yellow-haired Demeter seeks her daughter far 
and wide among the haunts of gods and men. After a long 
and fruitless search the Sun-God tells her of the rape of her 
child. Then the mother's grief is turned to wrath. She 
curses the earth with barrenness, and the race of men are 
perishing with starvation. The gods who depend upon the 
worship of men for their existence compel Zeus to force 
Hades to restore Persephone to her mother. The grim god 
obeys, but as his bride departs, Hades gives her a pome- 

1 "Fairbanks," Mythology of Greece and Rome," p. 171. 
3 "The Golden Bough," Frazcr, Vol. I, p. 36. 



70 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

granate seed that possesses the magic power to compel her to 
return to him and spend in his house the third part of her 
time every year. 

In this myth we have not only the story of the seasons, 
the anxiety of the spring, the glory of the summer, the sad- 
ness of the autumn and the grief of winter, but we have also, 
as in a parable, the tale of a woman's life in its relation to 
her children. Her children are her tragedy: she conceives 
in pain, she rears them in anxiety; she gives them of her 
life, and after all the toil and travail they are snatched away 
from her by death, carried away in marriage, or lost in the 
adventures of life. 

Until recently a woman had no right in her children which 
the man was bound to respect. Although she had borne and 
bred them, they were not primarily hers but her husband's. 
Zeus acted after the manner of the Aryan man when he gave 
Persephone to Hades without the knowledge or consent of 
Demeter. To secure the simplest right in the life of her 
child, Demeter had to become militant, to turn herself into 
a fury, and force from the god what was due her as a goddess 
and a mother. 

Not only does the mother suffer from the hardness of the 
man, but she is sore wounded in her love by the children 
themselves. Love descends more readily than it ascends. 
The love of God for man is greater than the love of man for 
God, the love of the parent for the child stronger and warmer 
than the love of the child for the parent. Mother love sur- 
passes all other love in its intensity and duration. It is the 
highest form of love; it is sacrificial love, — that gives for the 
sake of giving. The fabled pelican feeding her young with 
her breasts is typical of this love. I knew such a human 
pelican once : a woman widowed, with five children, whom she 
fed and clothed, and, dying, left money in the bank to provide 
for their education. And when we came to bury her, she 
had no breasts ; she had literally given them to her children 
to eat, — she had starved them off her bosom. 

The tragedy of mother love is that it never can be ade- 
quately returned ; each mother in turn can give it to her 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 71 

children, but because of this fact, — because these children 
must in turn give to their chidren, — they cannot give to the 
parents. Love is the gift of the earth to the plants, not of 
the plants to the earth. 

The children must live their own life; they must blossom, 
fruit, and seed, and then pass on, leaving the earth to mourn. 
The mother cannot keep the children, for the children will 
not be always children ; they soon become as their mother, 
women grown, with desire for children of their own. It 
is the refusal to recognize the fact that one's children are no 
longer one's children, but men and women in the world, that 
is the cause of much unhappiness. I am sure that Per- 
sephone, though she loved her mother, was not altogether 
unwilling to go away with Hades and live with him as his 
bride and queen. 

But the woman's life, even when her children are grown 
and gone, is not necessarily devoid of interest and affection. 
What she formerly gave to her home she can now give to 
the world ; and from the world she can receive affection to 
fill her vacant heart. This principle is illustrated by the 
story of Demeter and Eleusis. In the course of her wander- 
ings Demeter came to the plains of Eleusis, where a farmer, 
not knowing who she was, took her in, gave her bread and 
wine and shelter, and when she departed, in return for this 
hospitality, she made the plains of Eleusis a miracle of fer- 
tility. And there every year, through all the Grecian period, 
the mysteries of the goddess were celebrated, and she was 
beloved and honored more than all the gods. 

Demeter was not only the mother of Persephone, she was 
also the goddess of agriculture. She had a public as well as 
a private function to perform. The prosperity of the world 
was in her keeping. 

The notion that woman is not a factor in business is so 
false as to be ridiculous. From the beginning she has been 
the mainstay of industry. The factory system of our day 
is the outgrowth of the home industries of the earlier periods. 
Many evils of our modern life are due to the fact that men 
are trying to do the work that properly belongs to the woman. 



72 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The industrial life is the sphere of the woman ; she has the 
genius to turn the raw material to human uses. As long as 
women were in control of the operations of industry the work 
of the world was inspired by religion. Prayers were said 
and hymns were sung at the cutting of the grain and the 
grinding of the corn. Now that men have charge there is 
ribaldry and cursing and the absence of God. 

Our modern official religion is the religion of the male 
world. Its God is a father in the sky not a mother on the 
earth. The earth has been treated by this sky-father as the 
woman has been treated by the man. It has been the servant 
of his will, not the equal partner of his life. He sits aloft 
in his glorious ease, while she travails in pain and degradation 
below. It is his province to command, her duty to obey. 

But this male world is in process of passing away. Mother 
Earth is asserting herself. She is saying to Father-God : "I, 
too, am divine. My earth is as holy as your heaven ; my 
sorrows as sacred as your joys. I claim my place as youi 
equal in the house of the gods. My word must be as your 
word. I will work with you, but not under you." 

This rebellion of the earth-mother against the sky-father, 
— of woman against man, — is startling the universe. The 
women have the matter under their control. If, like De- 
meter, they go on strike, if they refuse to be with men at bed 
or board, to cook the food or sew the garments, if the) go 
in mourning and refuse to eat bread or drink water until men 
grant them an equal place in the world, then there is no 
help for it: the man must yield to woman her right to full 
partnership in all that pertains to the common life. 

The woman is more than a woman, she is a person. She 
is of the substance of divine humanity. Her sex life is tem- 
porary, her human life is eternal. She is both a mother and 
a goddess. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 73 

CHAPTER XVI 

Hades: God of the Dead 

The consciousness of death came to man little by little. 
We cannot believe that in the lower animal world there is 
any comprehension of death, — in the human sense of the word. 
That some vague notion of death haunts the animal mind 
may be possible ; for when a cow dies in a pasture the rest of 
the herd is startled and gathers round the dead body and 
makes a sort of lamentation ; but as soon as the carcass is 
removed, the lamentation ceases and the incident closes. The 
animal does not reflect on death as universal to all living 
things. The anticipation of its own death has, probably, no 
place in the animal mind. 

With man, however, it is different. With the cultivation 
of his faculties of memory and foresight, with his powers of 
abstraction and generalization, he has come to know death 
not as an incident but as a law. He comes to the conclusion 
that it is appointed unto all men once to die. He reckons 
with his own death as with a certainty. He buys his burial 
place, he makes his will, he sets his house in order as one 
who must die and not live. The day and the hour of his 
death he may not know, but the fact of it he cannot doubt. 

Religion has always had much to do and to say about death. 
Indeed, in the modern world at least, if it were not for death 
there would be little or no call for religion.. Our God is more 
especially the god of the beyond ; he rules in the regions of 
the dead. 

As soon as the facts of death engaged the thought of man 
he began to construct a system in which death should not 
be the finality that it seems to be in nature. If a man die, 
shall he live again? was a question answered in the affir- 
mative by mankind in general; the Hebrew in doubting and 
denying it was the exception. 

The relation of death to the bodily form puzzled the ob- 
server. At first death leaves the body unchanged as to its 



74 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

form and substance. The body is glorified by death. In 
"The Giaour," Byron expresses this view of death in the won- 
derful lines : 

He that hath bent him o'er the dead, 

Ere the first day of death is fled. 

The first dark day of nothingness, 

The last of danger and distress. 

(Before decay's effacing fingers 

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers) 

Have marked the mild angelic air, 

The rapture of repose that's there, 

The fixed yet tender traits that streak, 

The languor of the placid cheek. 

And — but for that sad shrouded eye, 

That fires not, wins not, weeps not now, 

And but for that chill changeless brow 

Where cold obstructions apathy 

Appalls the gazing mourner's heart 

As if to him it could impart 

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon 

Yes, but for these, and these alone, 

Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour 

He might still doubt the tyrant's power. 

So fair, so calm, so softly sealed, 

The first last look, by death revealed. 

This aspect of death gave rise to the belief in the contin- 
uance of the body. Death could change, it could not destroy. 
So, in all early religions we find a firm belief that the life 
of the body goes on after death. It could no longer live on 
the earth, but it could live under the earth. When the body 
was buried, the means of life, such as food and weapons, were 
buried with it, that it might not suffer the want of these 
things in its new dwelling-place. 

In all early religions the continuance of life after death 
is associated with burial and the grave. The dead are held 
to be conscious in the grave. They are either happy or 
miserable there, — happy if their descendants visit their graves 
with offerings, miserable if they are neglected. Their life 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 75 

in the underworld is the shadow of which life in the upper- 
world is the substance. To live on in the grave was, in the 
ancient thought, better than not to live at all ; but it was a 
pale and shadowy existence, not to be desired. To the vivid 
imagination there was a horror in the notion of this life in 
death that made death a terror. What might not take place 
in those dark and silent chambers? Again Byron has ex- 
pressed the thought of the ancient mind better than any 
modern poet : 

It is as though the dead might feel 
The icy worm about them steal, 
Without the power to scare away 
These cold consumers of their clay. 

We, who have outgrown these conceptions of our fore- 
fathers, do not know how great our deliverance is. We still 
associate our dead with their place of burial ; we still bring 
flowers to them and think our presence at their grave a con- 
solation to them, but we are freed from the horror of thinking 
of them as alive and conscious. For us they are transformed 
into the clean earth ; they have enriched with their sweetness 
the mold and are alive again in the growing grass and the 
blooming clover. But with the ancients the dead were con- 
scious in the grave, having power to come out and visit the 
living with their blessing or their ban. 

But if the fate of the buried body was sad, that of the un- 
buried corpse was terrible ; it was as a child without a home, 
a man without a country. Claudio cries, in "Measure for 
Measure" : 

To be imprisoned in the viewless wind, 

And blown with restless violence round about 

The pendant world. 

This was the fate of unburied souls that went shrieking by 
the windows as the mad winds carried them away from 
human habitations up into the mountains, or out into the sea. 

But if they were properly buried, in the sepulchre of their 



76 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

fathers they had their share in the family life, food was 
placed for them on their tombs and libations were poured 
out to them at the table. 

Gradually the liberty of the dead was enlarged. They were 
supposed to be free to leave their graves and go to some 
common meeting-place in the hollows of the earth. This 
was considered in the way of a relief from the terrible mon- 
otony of the grave. Here were the Elysian fields. Here 
the dead could gather and talk over old times, but there was 
nothing going on in that region of peace; no struggle for 
existence called forth the energies of the will ; no demand 
was made upon the muscles of the body. All was still with 
an eternal stillness in that abode of the dead, — only shadows 
talking with shadows of that which had been but never would 
be again. 

In that realm of shades, Hades, son of Chronos and the 
brother of Zeus, was god and king. This god is himself the 
shadow of his brother on Olympus. He has no history. His 
rape of Persephone does not belong to him in his character 
as keeper of the gates of the grave but rather as the god 
who dwells in the inner parts of the earth where the gold and 
the silver and the precious stones are kept, as in a vault, 
for the enrichment of those to whom they are given by the 
gods of the rich. He gives them that hard, lifeless mineral 
wealth in which the rich have always delighted. As the 
husband of Persephone he may be associated with agriculture, 
but that is the province of his wife, not his. She must be 
released from his power in order to exercise her own. So 
Persephone lives a third of the year with her husband under 
the earth, and two-thirds with her mother above the earth. 

From Hades, the King of the Dead, a later religion derived 
its notion of Satan, the ruler of hell. But the idea of the 
ancient world is, in the modern cult, degraded by a cruel and 
foul imagination. The home of Hades is changed from a 
place of monotonous rest to a place of actual torment. Satan 
is not the son nor the brother of the high gods, he is the 
enemy of God. Death is not the complement of life, it is 
the wages of sin. This Satan, the ruler of hell, is, in this 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 77 

modern religion, one of the mightiest of gods. His dominion 
is eternal over the souls that he has won for himself. In 
the "Inferno" and the "Paradise Lost," Satan is more inter- 
esting than God and, in a way, greater than God ; for he 
defeats the purposes of God, and makes himself and his hell 
necessary to the existence of God. In this modern concep- 
tion of religion one might almost dare to say that if there 
were no hell there would be no God. But of this more 
hereafter. 

Goethe, the poet of the great nature religion of our own 
times, has said : "Death cannot be an evil, because it is 
universal." 

Death does not defeat God ; it is a part of His plan. When 
a man dies, he passes away not from but into the source of 
life. While he lives, he is life individualized ; when he dies, 
he is life universalized. And so it is written in the Vulgate : 

Esto fidelis usque ad mortem, 
Et dabo tibi coronam vitae 1 



CHAPTER XVII 

Dionysus: God of Madness 

The Aryan religion, as it was developed by the Greek 
genius, was essentially sane. The cult of Athena and the cult 
of Apollo were the recognition, under the form of religious 
worship, of the pure and applied reason. Devotion to these 
gods was manifested in august ceremonies, in processions, 
in athletic games, in an architecture severe in its simplicity, 
in a sculpture that for the greater part represented the human 
figure in repose, or if in action, as is the case of the Disk 
Thrower, it is graceful, dignified action. In the Apollonian 

1 Be ye faithful unto death, 
And I will give thee a crown of life. 



78 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

cult emotion is restrained and directed by reason. Sanity 
is required by those who enter the temple of the Sun God, in 
whose clear light errors are dissipated and truth made plain. 

The cult of Apollo satisfied the Greek in the vigorous 
period of his expansion. As long as he lived an active, ob- 
jective life, so long did Apollo and the Muses content his 
religious instinct. But with the development of the Greek 
civilization, subjecting as it did the many to the rule of the 
few, confining (as was its custom) the woman to the seclusion 
of the house, a vast population was brought into being, whose 
pent-up emotions, finding no outlet in the religion of reason 
which the men of the ruling class had set up, gave themselves 
over without restraint to a religion of madness. 

The cult of Dionysus, the God of Madness, competed with 
the cult of Apollo, the God of Reason, and swept within the 
circle of its influence the women and the slaves, making of 
the women furies and of the slaves drunkards. 

This cult, in my judgment, is of Eastern and Semitic origin. 
Two distinct types of religion have always contended for 
supremacy,— one we may call the Aryan type, the other the 
Semitic type. The Aryan type is ceremonial, the Semitic 
type orgiastic ; the one moves in the outer world of fact, the 
other in the inner world of feeling ; the one expresses itself 
objectively in creed and ceremony, the other subjectively in 
weeping and praying. In the one a man, to be truly religious, 
must be himself; in the other he must be beside himself. 
The one gives us a poet reciting the deeds of the gods ; the 
other the dancing dervish filled with the power of the gods. 

Dionysus, the God of Intoxication, is the representative of 
the orgiastic element in the Greek religion. He is the god 
of the wine and of fermentation. He is also the god of 
the generative forces ; who inspires lust and is heard in the 
bellows of the bull in the time of heat. In the celebration 
of his festivals men and women threw off the restraints of 
the acquired reason and gave themselves over to primitive 
passions. Breaking out of their homes, women rushed off 
into the forests and threw aside their shame with their cloth- 
ing. Slaves had the courage of their animalism and, in de- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 79 

fiance of their servitude, became freemen in the realm of 
drunkenness and lust. 

Dr. Farnell has set forth the character of this cult so 
clearly in his "Cults of the Greek States" that I quote him 
at length for the benefit of my reader. Says this scholar : 

"Such was the religion which played a conquering part 
in the large area of the Mediterranean, assisted at times by 
the proselytizing zeal of religious brotherhoods and penetrat- 
ing many of the citadels of the Hellenic cult, and which was 
not wholly obliterated by the forms and dogmas of Chris- 
tianity. We can understand the power of its appeal : its 
orgiastic dance and revel gratified the primeval passion that 
is still strong in us for self abandonment and for ecstatic 
communion with the life and the power of the earth ; through 
divine possession induced by the sacrament or the vertigo 
of the sacred dance, the votary assumed the power of the 
nature god, to work miracles, to move mountains, to call 
forth rivers of milk and wine ; the religion promised immor- 
tality and release from bondage to sanity and measure and 
appealed to the craving for subnormal moods, blending the 
joy of life on the mountains with a fierce lust for hot blood ; 
a lust half animal, half religious." 1 

In all periods of history, man has sought for intoxication 
induced by alcoholism, opium, or religious emotionalism, in 
order to escape from the restraint of his conscious self. In 
times of over-civilization, of public or private calamity, men 
seek salvation by abandonment ; they get drunk ; they drug 
themselves; they give way to wild fantastic feelings. With 
men this form of deliverance is found most frequently in 
intoxication. The man breaks out, goes on a spree, lets go 
his hold on sobriety, decency, honor, and sanity. All men, 
especially men of parts, are liable to these outbreaks. Men 
like Fox and Webster react against their high mentality and 
fall into low brutality; being drunk with thought, they sober 
up by being drunk with wine. 

1 "Cults of the Greek States," vol. V, pp. 107-108. 



80 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Women are more apt to find relief from pent-up life in 
religious ecstacy. They are the easy prey of the revivalist, 
who intoxicates them with his verbiage and takes possession 
of them through his animal magnetism. The souls of men 
and women during a revival are excited to frenzy by descrip- 
tions of hell, and relaxed to languor by voluptuous portrayals 
of heaven. Christianity, so far from ignoring these primitive 
passions, cultivates them. The ritual of the Catholic Church 
is a blend of the orgiastic and the ceremonial. It makes 
a powerful appeal to the emotions as distinct from reason. 
The Novena, the pilgrimage, the wonder-working power of 
the saints and the Virgin are possible only because women 
as a whole, and man in a measure, are worshippers of Dion- 
ysus rather than Apollo. The Unitarian depends upon the 
pure ethic of the Gospel, and his churches are empty; the 
Catholic makes his appeal through the sensuous ceremonial 
of the Mass, and his churches are crowded five times a day. 

The precepts of reason will never control the conduct of 
men unless they are aided and abetted by the emotions. Hope 
and fear and joy and sorrow are the drawing forces of human 
life. Man is forever either fleeing from fear or indulging in 
hope; he is falling into sorrow or rising into joy. The terror 
from which the soul is forever trying to escape is the terror 
of stagnation. Self-consciousness is always in danger of 
becoming consciousness of self, and that way madness lies. 
When consciousness lies stagnant in self it genders ennui, 
loathing, paralyzing fear, from which it must escape to pre- 
serve its vitality. To avoid this disaster, men seek the com- 
pany of their fellows, read books, go to the theatre, get drunk, 
fall into diverse sins. A German professor has said that con- 
sciousness of self is the great mistake of the universe. How- 
ever that may be, it certainly is the dread of man. In the 
day he drives it out by work and by play, and in the night 
he drowns it in sleep. Man is that paradox who is most 
himself when not himself. Man must lose himself in his 
occupations, or he will lose himself in his cups. Paul bids 
him: "Be not drunk with wine, but be intoxicated with the 
spirit." 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 81 

There is the madness of God as well as the madness of the 
brute. Man may rise above himself as well as sink below 
himself. Religion cannot exclude Dionysus from the temples 
of the gods. It may subordinate Dionysus to Apollo, if it 
can; but it will have Dionysus whether or no. Grape juice 
is no substitute for wine, because in grape juice there is no 
intoxication. If our temperance reformers would be success- 
ful, they must make life as inspiring as wine. Men have 
been so intoxicated with the spirit of humanity that they 
have been as drunkards, beside themselves, oblivious to the 
restraints of consciousness. Then we have St. Bernard so 
drunk with the spirit that he walks all day on the shores of 
Lake Leman and never sees the water ; we have St. Francis 
talking to the birds as if he were a silly man befuddled by 
his drink; we have the Greek philosopher running naked 
through the streets, intoxicated by a thought. 

Man must worship at the shrine of both Dionysus and 
Apollo. He must be sane, but not too sane. A little mad- 
ness now and then is granted to the sanest men. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

The Fall of the Greek Dynasty 

The charm of the Greek religion is found in its variety. 
The fertile imagination of this branch of the Aryan race has 
made the world its debtor for all time. It has peopled the 
sky and the earth and the seas with divinities. The constel- 
lations in the sky were the children of the god Uranos ; the 
waves of the ocean were the horses of Poseidon ; the crimson 
clouds of the dawn were the steeds of Apollo ; the freshening 
breeze of the morning was the breath of Athena; the noonday 
clouds were the chariots of Zeus, who rode the storm, flashed 
in the lightning, and bellowed in the thunder. In the night 
Uranos walked with his children ; in the day Chronos played 
with the hours. 



82 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The Greek mind had an almost fatal facility in this power 
of personification. There was nothing in nature so great 
that the Greek thought could not mould it into the fashion 
of a man and call it a god ; nothing so little that it did not 
seem to him divine. Beside his major and his minor gods 
he had nymphs and satyrs and dryads innumerable. Every 
fountain had its Arethusa, every mountain stream its Alpheus. 

In its variety the Greek religion was a counterpart of nat- 
ure, as nature was manifested in the mountains and valleys, 
in the fountains and streams, in the bays and islands of the 
Greek peninsula and archipelago. This land with its moun- 
tains separating valley from valley, with its deep seas dividing 
land from land, was the natural home of individualism. Each 
projection into the sea stood alone; each valley was a world 
by itself. Athens and Sparta evolved distinct and antagon- 
istic civilizations. 

It is this variety that gives to Greece its abiding beauty 
and interest. It is this which is the source of its weakness, 
— the reason of its short-lived glory. This lack of unity was 
the cause of the early decline and final subjection of Greece 
to a civilization lacking altogether variety and beauty, but 
having strength and unity. 

The Greek civilization was in its political and religious 
life without any unifying element. Zeus was never quite the God 
but only a god. He was first among equals, but any wor- 
shipper could prefer to him the least of the gods of Olympus 
and still be orthodox. During the whole of the later period 
the foreign cult of Dionysus rivaled in popularity the purely 
Grecian cult of Apollo. This itch for variety was the mother 
of an insatiable curiosity. As St. Luke said : "The Athen- 
ians had no other desire but to hear or tell some new thing." 
Any god was welcome, so only he was a new god. 

This lack of unity in religion was but the reflex of the 
unity that was wanting in the political life of the country. 
The city states of Greece were each independent and contin- 
ually at war with one another. There was a brief period 
of unity under the leadership of Athens to resist the Persian 
invasion ; but when this danger was past the two most im- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 83 

portant city states of the Hellenic civilization, Athens and 
Sparta, engaged in a war for supremacy, in which neither 
prevailed, but in which both were exhausted. Weakened by 
division, depleted by fratricidal strife, the Greek city states 
came easily under the dominion of the half barbarian province 
of Macedon. But even the Macedonian monarchy did not 
supply to Greece the lacking element of unity. 

Had he lived, Alexander could not and would not have 
unified Greece ; he was himself without a sense of essential 
unity. His mind was set upon conquest not upon unification. 
When he died his empire fell to pieces at once, and it was 
left to another and a greater genius to unify the Western 
world. The Greek mind sought vainly in philosophy for a 
principle of unification. One school after another set itself 
to the solution of this problem. But fire and water, earth 
and sky, mind and matter, were, in the Greek thought, separ- 
ated by impassable gulfs. The flux of Heraclitus was a 
process, the absolute of Plato an abstraction, neither of which 
could become a principle of unity strong enough to reduce 
the chaos of the world to subjection. Philosophy could not 
then and cannot now give unity to life. It has been the his- 
tory of philosophy that each system is antagonistic to every 
other system, so that in philosophy we have all the variety, 
all the beauty, and all the weakness of the Greek civilization. 

The Greek gods lost their hold on the life of the people as 
a consequence of this vain effort at unification. No one 
of them was able to prevail over the other. As we have seen, 
the poets immortalized the sins of their youth and condemned 
them to a futile old age. If Apollo possessed a clean record 
and an eternal youth, he was, as all gods are apt to be, hand- 
icapped by his own infallibility. His oracles at Delphi and 
elsewhere had committed him to so many statements and 
positions that the critical reason had little difficulty in dis- 
crediting his wisdom. It was this critical reason that played 
havoc with all the divinities of Greece. Some of them it 
argued and some of them it laughed out of existence. The 
gods were an offense to the serious and a jest on the lips of 
the gay. 



84 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The Greek civilization, in its later period, was lacking in 
seriousness because it was wanting in unity. Anything like 
settled convictions are impossible to the ultra-curious mind. 
The desire for the new leads to the constant uprooting of 
the old. One phase of religious faith has hardly time to 
make itself heard in the market-place before it is drowned 
out by the noise of a fresh arrival. In all periods of transi- 
tion we find this lack of seriousness. One form of religion 
is so constantly discrediting other forms that they all fall 
into the like contempt. This fate befell the gods of the Greek 
dynasty. They fell from their thrones, the civilization over 
which they presided passed into a new civilization under the 
dominion of a new religion in which the principle of unity 
was paramount. 

We turn away from the gods of the Greek dynasty with 
reluctance. Some say they were no gods, only the imagina- 
tions of men ; but what are the imaginations of men but the 
reflection of the living God? The soul of man is a deep, 
still lake over which the Infinite broods and in which the 
Infinite is reflected. The reflection changes with the changing 
times. By day the mirrored waters of the soul reflect the 
round disk of the sun, by night the pointed stars ; now a 
cloud passes over the surface and is reflected in the deep, now 
the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake are one, and there 
are really two skies looking and smiling at each other. 

To say that a god is imaginary is not to assert that he is 
unreal ; it is only to say that he is incomplete. No body of 
water can reflect the sky as a whole. The gods of the Greek 
dynasty may be dead as individual deities, but they are alive 
forevermore in that vision of God which is forever haunting 
the soul of man. 



Book III 
THE ROMAN GOD 



CHAPTER XIX 

Divus Caesar: God of the Organization 

The Greek religion of the imagination was in the course 
of human events brought into subjection to the Roman re- 
ligion of practical politics. The Romans as a people were 
lacking in the poetic faculty which creates a rich mythology, 
but they were past masters of all that relates to the business 
of daily life. Their genius for affairs gave them the leader- 
ship of the Mediterranean world. 

The marvelous success of the city of Rome is the open 
secret of history. Rome was successful because the city 
of Rome was the god of the people of Rome, — a god whom 
they worshipped with an absolute devotion. In Rome the 
city state became self-conscious, self-centered, self-aggran- 
dizing. 

When we first meet with the Roman people they do not 
impress us with a sense of their coming greatness. They 
are a group of Aryan shepherds and herdsmen who have come 
into Italy, probably, by the way of the sea, and settled on 
some low-lying hills on the river Tiber, seventeen miles from 
where it empties into the Mediterranean. These intruders 
are in the last stages of higher barbarism. They have flocks 
and herds that feed upon the fertile plains that lie about their 
settlement; in a rude way they cultivate the soil and live a 
simple pastoral and agricultural life. They are an unwarlike 
people, being content if they can defend themselves in the 
possession of the land which they occupy. The social organ- 
ization of these shepherds is that of the family and the clan. 
Each family owns the land which it tills in severalty. The 
authority of the house-father as the lord of the family is 
recognized by custom and sanctioned by religion. The 

87 



88 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

women are the property of the men, but are not shut up 
within the confines of the house; for a pastoral and agricul- 
tural people must make use of its women as workers in the 
pasture and in the field and grant them the liberty demanded 
by their occupation. 

Whatever government there might have been outside of 
the family was of the most primitive character. It consisted 
of the leadership of the heads of the leading families in war 
and in council. The families had not as yet developed through 
the clan into the state. The clans were, in all probability, 
jealous of one another and without any center or principle 
of unity, except kinship. 

The religion of this people was in keeping with their social 
and economic development, — it was the crudest form of an- 
cestor-and-natn re-worship. The gods of these hill tribes 
could hardly be called gods ; they were devoid of personal 
character and personal history. The hearth and the door 
and the organs of generation were the direct objects of wor- 
ship. Religious feeling was centered upon the phenomena 
of reproduction. 

Professor Carter, in his valuable monograph "The Relig- 
ious Life of Ancient Rome," says: 

"The essential feature of this religion was its social char- 
acter. Religion was not a personal matter, nay, it could not 
be, because the very concept of personality was in its infancy. 
There was no individual initiative or volition in the whole 
matter. Man did not choose his god any more than he 
chose his parents. He was born into a circle of gods ready- 
made for him just as he was born into a set of human rela- 
tionships. The fulfillment of his duty to those gods was 
a normal and natural function of his life... In the intensity 
of the struggle for physical existence these powers of reproduc- 
tion must be propitiated, that man and beast and mother 
earth might bring forth plentifully after their kind. This 
physical note, the instinct of propagation is dominant in all 
the early religion of Rome." ' 

1 "Religious Life of Ancient Rome," Carter. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 89 

To this day there is this vein of coarseness in Italian 
life,— j°kes at weddings and the like that are vestiges of the 
thought that inspired the ancient religion. These hill tribes 
did not in this early period rise to anything like a definite 
worship of the higher powers of nature as such. No Uranos 
carried his children stars in their sight, no Chronos played 
with the hours ; all such sentimentality lay outside the 
comprehension of these plain folk who had no use for a god 
who could not be of use to them. 

That such a people should have been reserved for a sublime 
destiny is, as I have said, the open secret of history. Their 
character was their destiny. They saw that living was de- 
pendent not on gods far away but on powers that were near- 
est to man. The gods were to be found in the fire on their 
hearth ; in the loins of the man and the womb of the woman ; 
in the corn in the ear and in the wine in the vat. If these 
gods were propitious, what mattered if the others were pleased 
or no? 

This people would never have entered upon the career 
that made them famous, if they had been left to their own 
devices. They were without any principle of unity, without 
any urge of ambition. 

About five-hundred-and-fifty years before the present era 
they had the good fortune to be beaten in war and brought 
under subjection by a people much farther advanced than 
themselves in all that relates to the social, religious and po- 
litical life of mankind. 

It is singular fact of history that Rome was not founded 
by the Romans. The creation of the city was the work of 
the Etruscans, a people of mixed race that came from the 
north who for a time were the dominant people of the Italian 
peninsula. The Romulian gens of the Etruscan nation were 
the leaders in the work of subduing the hill tribes on the 
Tiber. They crowded the people into a common center, 
built a wall, set up a king, and called the name of the city 
which they founded Roma, being as it was the city of the 
Romulians. For a period the Etruscan kings reigned in 
Rome. The tribes or clans were unified in a common citizen- 



90 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

ship. The unity of the city found expression in the worship 
of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. In due time these 
kings, having made of the clans a city, giving them a name 
and a place in the earth, were dethroned and exiled; and that 
wonderful political organism known as the Roman Republic 
came to its birth. 

The name of the new organization was indicative of its 
character. It was a respublica, — a public thing, which re- 
duced all private things to subordination. It was the organ- 
ization demanding the absolute submission and devotion of 
the individual. In the Greek civilization the emphatic word 
in politics was demos, — the people. The city in theory ex- 
isted for the sake of the people, not the people for the city. 
In Rome the emphasis was laid upon the city; it was not the 
people who gave importance to the city; it was the city that 
gave dignity to the people. Romanus sum was the proud 
boast of every Roman. Rome was, thus, to a Roman his god in 
whom he lived, moved and had his being. The household gods 
were worshipped at the family altar ; the old divinities of the field 
had their temple and their sacrifices, but all other religion 
was anaemic when compared with the red-blooded religion 
of the State. In Rome patriotism was a passion, compelling 
a man to forsake father and mother, wife and children, 
house and land, even life itself, at the call of the State. 
This spirit of patriotic devotion was developed and deep- 
ened by the history of the city. Rome was from the begin- 
ning to the end of her career engaged in a struggle for po- 
litical existence and political extension. She had at the first 
to maintain her independence by a life-and-death grapple 
with the Etruscan kings. The story of Lars Porsena and 
Horatius at the Bridge has been recited in every red school- 
house since Macaulay wrote his swinging lines celebrating 
that event. The poetical narrator has caught the very spirit 
of Roman religion in the words of Horatius to the Consul 
as he goes out to hold the bridge against the coming of the 
Tuscan : "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon 
or late." To die soon for the State is better than to die late 
for self. Men die ; Rome lives. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 91 

From the first the Roman had a profound belief in the 
eternity of his city. No sooner had Rome been delivered 
from the Etruscan dominion than she had to consolidate and 
secure her safety by incorporating into her policy and citi- 
zenship the towns of Latium. From the beginning it was 
the policy of Rome not only to conquer but to assimilate. 
Little by little, for her security, she extended her borders until 
they embraced first Italy and then the Mediterranean world. 
Up to the close of the second Punic War every conflict in 
which Rome engaged was primarily a struggle for existence. 
After the second Punic War the city entered upon its career 
of extension, which lasted until the reign of Trajan, in the 
II Century A. D., when the city entered once more on the 
struggle for existence, which ended in her transformation 
from the city of the Caesars into the city of the Popes. 

Throughout her entire history the primary business of 
Rome was politics. Rome was never an artistic, a literary, 
or a commercial center; she did not develop artists or poets, 
nor philosophers, nor merchants ; the products of her civil- 
ization were politicians and lawyers. Government being her 
province, she was the mother of jurisprudence. Until Caesar, 
Rome never produced a general of the first rank, and even 
Caesar was more of a politician than a soldier. As a conse- 
quence of this devotion to politics Rome evolved a vast po- 
litical organization adequate to the government of the world. 

The Civil Wars of the Republic were struggles within the 
city for the control of this world-embracing political machine. 
After the expulsion of the Etruscan king, the government 
of Rome reverted, as nearly as it could under the new con- 
ditions, to the old ways of the Aryan clan. The business 
of government was in the keeping of the House-Fathers, the 
heads of the old families. The Consuls were chosen from 
the House-Fathers to execute the laws. The real power 
was in and with the Senate, which was composed wholly, 
at first, of the heads of the old houses. 

The internal history of Rome is a story of the ceaseless 
effort on the part of the people to limit the power of the 
patricians and to make the government of Rome popular 



92 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

instead of aristocratic. The popular party triumphed, but 
only by clothing its leader with all the powers of government 
which it had taken from the aristocracy. When Caesar, the 
leader of the popular party, defeated Pompey and the aristo- 
crats on the field of Pharsalus, then Caesar was the master of 
Rome and the god of Rome. The death of Caesar did not 
for a moment arrest the revolution, of which he was the 
embodiment, and by which the constitution of Rome was 
changed from that of an aristocratic republic to an imperial 
democracy. The revolution was not so much political as it was 
religious. The worship of Rome was intensified, and was trans- 
formed into the worship of the Caesar. Julius was deified, 
a month in the year was made sacred to him, and all the 
emperors after him took his name and shared in his divine 
personality. 

The worship of Rome in the days of the republic and the 
worship of the Caesar in the days of the empire was the 
real religion of the Roman people. Not that Rome was 
neglectful of the other gods, — far from it. She gave most 
punctilious attention to every minutia of ritual which the 
worship of the least of the gods demanded. The Roman 
would worship any god and every god in the hope that such 
god would be of assistance to Rome in her warfare with the 
world and helpful to his party in Rome in its struggle for 
supremacy. 

During the second Punic War the Romans were told that 
if they would bring the Mother of the gods from Syria, she 
would by her presence drive Hannibal out of Italy. She 
was sent for at once. Publius Scipio, as the best man in 
Rome, received her sacred stone with divine honors, the chief 
of the matrons of the city became her servants, and Hannibal 
was driven out of Italy. 

The Roman never hesitated to appropriate a god wherever 
he could find one ; he consulted the oracle of Apollo at Delphi ; 
having no sacred writings of his own, he appropriated the 
Sibylline Books ; his gods being without personality or his- 
tory, he identified them with the gods of Olympus and clothed 
them in the poetic garments of the Greek mythos. Cicero 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 93 

boasts of this religiosity of the Roman; speaking in the Sen- 
ate, he said: 

"O Conscript Fathers, boast of ourselves as we may, yet 
we must confess that the Greeks surpass us in the arts, the 
Gauls are more robust, the Carthaginians are more adroit, 
but we, Conscript Fathers, surpass all people in our belief 
that the affairs of men are in the keeping of the gods and in 
our devotion to the worship of the divinities." 

And it was even so. But religion in Rome was essentially 
political; the gods were conciliated in the interests of the 
State. "The religion of the Romans," says Walter Pater, 
"was not something to be known, not something to be be- 
lieved, not something to be loved, but something to be done 
at a certain time, in a certain place, after a certain way." 
What Romans really worshipped was Rome and all the gods 
as tributary to Rome. 

During the later Republic and the early Empire Rome 
brought all the gods from all the countries round about and 
placed them in the Roman Pantheon. There, separated each 
from his own land and his own people, these gods crowded to- 
gether, higgledy-piggledy, one upon another, humiliated and 
forgotten, lost all interest in their own divinity and so slowly 
faded away. 

The real god that superseded them all was Divus Caesar: 
the God of the Organization. This god was no figment of 
the imagination, living beyond the sky ; he was a dread reality, 
present in every open place and in every nook and corner 
of the Roman world. He could reward and punish ; at his 
word men were cast down ; at his word the}' were lifted up. 
At a whisper of Tiberius in Capri men died in the palaces 
of Rome or were exiled to the regions of Sythia. The Caesar 
spake the word in Rome and villages were laid waste in the 
fens of Ely and a city was founded on the banks of the 
Thames. 

The terror of the Roman organization was in its compre- 
hensiveness. It embraced the whole of the then known 



94 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

world and looked after every detail of life. There was no 
escape from it except by death, and even after death the god 
of the organization could wreack its vengeance on the children 
of the man whom it hated. And the blessings of the organ- 
ization were as effective as its curses. It could and did give 
peace to a distracted Europe; it conferred the glory of its 
citizenship and the benefits of its civilization upon a bar- 
barian people; its laws were the common protection of the 
rich and the poor; it made of the peasant a citizen, and of 
the provincial an emperor. 

For more than five centuries Rome presided as a god over 
the destinies of the Western world. The image of her Caesar 
was at every crossroad, — to burn incense upon the altar of 
her Caesar the one necessary act of devotion. 

The worship of this God of the Organization always has 
been and is now the worship of the majority. Other gods 
of courtesy there may be, but the God of the Organization 
is the real god. He has continuity and ubiquity. He can 
reward and punish ; and whether he be Imperial or Papal 
Rome, whether he be Tammany Hall or the Old Guard, in- 
carnate in Caesar, Pope, or Boss, he demands and receives the 
obeisance of men as the price of their peace and prosperity 
in the earth. 



Book IV 
THE HEBREW GODS 



CHAPTER XX 

The Rise of the Semitic Dynasty 

The God of the Organization can buy or enforce the wor- 
ship of the lips, but he cannot attract the worship of the 
heart ; for though men may fawn upon him for his favors, or 
crouch before him in their fears, they can never love him. 
The worship of the organization is death to all idealism and 
to all inspiration. Under bondage to this Moloch, men can- 
not think with their own minds, love after their own desires, 
nor act in accordance with their own judgment. . If they are 
organization men, then the organization thinks for them, loves 
and hates for them, and tells them what to do. Life and 
organization are necessary to each other, and yet they must 
be always in conflict. Organization seeks to stifle life and 
life to destroy organization. Organization limits life, and 
life outgrows organization. 

The vast and perfect organization of the Roman world 
arrested the development of life. After the brief efflorescence 
of the Augustan period the Roman world entered upon a 
decline that ended in death. What little originality the 
Roman mind possessed was forbidden exercise. The watch- 
ful jealousy of the organization stamped out anything that 
had the appearance of genius. In the II Century there was 
a brief afterglow of intellectual activity that found its man- 
ifestation in the writings of Tacitus and in the meditations 
of Marcus Aurelius; but after that came the darkness. The 
God of the Organization held the soul in thrall ; the fear of 
him and the dread of him were upon all the Roman world. 
Men did not seek distinction, for distinction meant death; 
only the obscure were safe, and they because they were be- 
yond and beneath the care of this grim god who ruled as 
prince in the city. 

97 



98 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The old civilization of the city-state was sick unto death. 
It had, like all organizations, within itself the cause of its 
destruction. The industrial system was based upon a gross 
injustice, the city-state was the organization of the leisure, 
propertied classes, whereby they might secure for themselves 
the benefits accruing from the social order. They were the 
consumers of what others produced; they lived upon the un- 
requited labor of their slaves. These slaves were men and 
women of their own or kindred race, taken in war or born 
in servitude, who were allowed to live only as they served 
the purposes of their masters. These slaves had no interest 
whatever in the organization which their masters had set 
up ; they were the victims offered daily upon the altars of 
its luxury, its lust, and its cruelty. 

From the beginning of civilization this class was outside 
the law ; it had no rights ; only duties. The helots of Sparta 
were whipped and massacred as a part of the education of 
the youth of Sparta. The City of Athens sent its slaves, 
naked, into its silver mines and kept them there, deprived 
of the light of the sun and the love of women, until they died. 
Crassus of Rome inflicted the like cruelty upon thousands 
of slaves whom he worked to death in his mines in Sardinia. 
The industrial system of ancient civilization was wasteful of 
human labor and human life. Slave labor is always the most 
uneconomical kind of labor, — a slave is hardly ever worth 
his keep. The old civilization was dying, and its gods were 
dying with it. 

Down in that underworld of slaves a new religion was 
gendering and coming to the birth. In the slave class virtues, 
which to the master class were not virtues but vices, were 
in course of evolution. The slave, if he is to exist, must be 
obedient and patient and long-suffering; he must not give 
railing for railing but, contrarywise, blessing. The slaves 
must help one another to bear the miseries of their slavery ; 
they must have their songs in the night; they must wash 
each other's wounds with water, having no oil or wine. Hav- 
ing food and raiment, they must be therewith content. He 
that hath two coats must give to him that has none. The 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 99 

slave must live for the day; the morrow is not his. All the 
virtues of humanity and mutuality are slave virtues, engen- 
dered in slave quarters as means of protection against the 
fierceness of their masters. They are as lambs in the midst 
of wolves; they must be as wise as serpents and as harmless 
as doves.. 

The god of the master class cannot be the god of the sub- 
ject class. The sacrifices of the one are the abomination of 
the other. The master thinks of humanity as degradation ; 
to the slave it is salvation; the master cannot be pitiful and 
be a master; the slave must be pitiful, if he is a slave. If 
he pity nothing else, he will pity his own bowed head that 
dares not lift itself for fear of an insult. Everything in the 
slave's life is antipathetic to the master, so that they cannot 
bow before the same altar nor eat of the same sacrifice. 

So it came to pass that while the god of the Imperial or- 
ganization was receiving the adoration of the higher and 
leisure classes, another god was calling forth the enthusiastic 
worship of the subject and working class. This god, like 
themselves, was a child of poverty and obscurity; he came 
of a people to whom bondage was a birthright; whose his- 
tory is one long story of captivity, exile, disfranchisement, and 
endurance of contempt. 

When history first takes notice of this people, they are a 
band of Semite shepherds, wandering in the desert regions of 
North Arabia. In that arid land they have a bitter struggle 
for existence. Their life is necessarily limited to the barest 
subsistence ; they live in tents ; they eat the wild fruits ; they 
drink water. They have never developed through the tribe 
into the clan and state. Their men are polygamous, their 
women subjected and despised ; male children are desired 
as sources of strength, and the son of the concubine is on 
a level with the son of the wife. They have no government 
except a loose chieftainship and a reverence and recognition 
of the rights of age. 

Their religion is animistic; they worship stones and meet 
with their gods in mountain places and in groves. They 
offer human and animal sacrifices to their deities, and devote 



100 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

themselves to the service of their gods by mutilation. When 
they emerge into history they have only one distinctive char- 
acteristic and that is their tribal consciousness. The tribe 
and not the family is the unit of organization. 

The tribe had its legendary origin in the remote past in 
the enforced or voluntary migration of its putative ancestor 
from the plains of Mesopotamia into the highlands of Syria. 
They are the children of Abraham, taking their tribal name, 
however, not from Abraham, but from his grandson Jacob ; 
who wrestled and prevailed and became a prince with God. 
Because of this, these wandering Bedouin shepherds called 
themselves the Bene-Israel (the sons of Israel) and as Israel- 
ites are they known to this day. 

The tribal consciousness of Israel was even more intense 
than the civil consciousness of Rome. Through the vicissi- 
tudes of thirty centuries it has been the dominant factor in 
their lives. Because of this devotion to the tribe, this people 
were never able to evolve into the city-state. While they 
have produced some great statesmen, yet as a people they 
have no genius for politics. With a marvelous power of 
tribal persistence and tribal expansion, they have never created 
a nationality. From the beginning of their history down to 
the present day they have been wanderers on the face of the 
earth ; strangers in a land that is not theirs. Their tribal 
consciousness has been their sole bond of unity, and has 
preserved them from the disintegrating forces to which all 
other tribes have yielded up their tribal existence, — a con- 
sciousness that has been brought into conjunction with the 
consciousness of a hundred other races and lived with them 
without losing its own identity. The Jew may be a Babyl- 
onian, an Egyptian, a Greek, a Roman, a Portuguese, a Ger- 
man, a Russian, a Pole, as circumstances determine, but he 
is everlastingly a Jew; as much a son of Israel to-day as 
when he wandered in the deserts of Arabia, five thousand 
years ago. 

His religion was the creation of his tribal consciousness. 
He unified his tribe in his God and his God in his tribe. 
There was one Israel and one God of Israel. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 101 

This unification of the tribe in the God did not come with- 
out a struggle. The religion of the Israelite, in common 
with that of the Semitic people, was animistic and orgiastic. 
His gods were sacred stones and sacred trees ; he worshipped 
the new moon, and sanctified the first fruits of the harvest. 
His worship was orgiastic rather than ceremonial ; in his re- 
ligious frenzy he danced himself drunk; he cut himself with 
knives, and lay all night naked on the ground. But from 
the earliest period there was one God greater than all other 
gods, and that was the tribe God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob. 

By a gradual process of elimination and assimilation this 
God absorbed all other gods and became the one god of 
Israel. There is no event in the spiritual history of the 
human race of equal importance with this evolution of the 
one god out of the tribal consciousness of Israel, — an event 
more pregnant of future consequences than the building of 
Athens, more significant to human destiny that the founding 
of the City of Rome, was the concentration of the affections 
of the Bene-Israel upon the tribe God, to the exclusion of 
all other gods, so that he only was God and there was no 
god beside him. 

It must not be supposed for a moment that these Bedouin 
shepherds were monotheists in the same sense that President 
Eliot is a monotheist ; for they were not, in any true sense, 
monotheists at all. Their God was not the only god, he was 
their only god ; while the nations had many gods, Israel wor- 
shipped only one. And this made all the difference between 
the religion of the Jews and the religion of the Gentile ; their 
religious emotions were diffused, his were concentrated ; they 
had a god for each separate function of life, he gave all the 
affairs of himself and his tribe into the keeping of the 
one God. 

But if Israel had only one God, he demanded that this God 
should have only one people. God is no more the god of 
Israel than Israel is the people of God. If God is jealous 
of Israel, Israel is equally jealous of God. This god has no 
existence or business apart from this people; he must give to 



102 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

them all his time, all his thought, all his care, all his love. 
He must fight their battles, give strength to the loins of their 
men, open the wombs of the women, bless their fields, build 
their houses, and keep their cities ; he must raise up their 
leaders, write their laws, and anoint their kings. The God 
of Israel in his prime was no idle god in a far-away heaven ; 
he was a present god, busy all day with the affairs of his 
people and watching over them all the night. It was no 
sinecure to be the God of Israel ; he had to be up and awake 
and on duty twenty-four hours in the day. 

It is one of the wonders that make human history so 
interesting that in the deification of this tribal consciousness 
of Israel we have the germ and the plasm of the religion of 
mankind up to the present time. Who would ever so much as 
dream that out of the tribal egoism of a desert people such 
a god could be born? Yet it is even so. The two underlying 
religious principles of this desert people are basic to all 
religion. 

The first of these is the supreme importance of Israel to 
the universe ; for him the world was created and because of 
him it was to be destroyed. His life is the one thing that 
gives value to all that is; his righteousness is the safety of 
the city; his sin its destruction. Let him pass away, ^and 
chaos will come again ; the earth will be without form, and 
void and darkness brood once more on the face of the deep. 
This intense egoism, this unfaltering belief in his own prime 
importance, has always been a characteristic of the Jew. It 
has made him the problem and the fear of the nations; he 
will push and push and push, and nothing can hold him back. 
He believes, with a sublime faith, in himself and in his people, 
and this belief is of the essence of his soul. 

The second basic thought in the mind of the Israelite was 
his dependence on some power outside himself for the suc- 
cessful issue of his life. All things were against him. He 
wandered in the desert where there was no water, he lived in 
a land where there was no corn ; he stood in fear of Moab 
and Amelek and all the hill tribes of Syria ; he was exposed 
to the heat day by day and the frost by night; he had no child 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 103 

in his house, because his wife was barren. It was this sense 
of the hostility of the world about him that compelled this 
sore bested man to seek in the very heart of that hostility 
for a friend and an ally. It was out of this sense of aliena- 
tion that the Israelitish conception of God was born. He 
believed in his own indomitable soul, and with that soul he 
penetrated behind all forms, modes, and shows of life, into 
life itself and made of that life his ally and his friend. 

And these, that were the basic principles of the Israelite, 
are the foundations of all religion. Without the supreme 
sense of the importance of human life, religion cannot endure 
for a moment. When once man comes to believe that he 
is a temporary phenomenon passing away like a shadow, 
his existence as the flight of the bird leaving no pathway ; 
when he thinks that what he does and what he does not do will 
not matter a thousand years from now, without a sense of his 
infinity and eternity, man cannot hold to religion. 

It is this sense of the importance of the life of man to the 
universe that has made man a religious being. In the man 
the universe centers, and from him it radiates. When a man 
has lost altogether his grip upon the importance of his own 
life and on human life in general then his energies flag, his 
spirit droops, his soul disintegrates, his breath expires. In 
proportion to his egoism is a man religious or lacking in 
religion. 

But his egoism, if it is to prevail over a hostile world, must 
ally itself with a greater ego than itself. He must be in 
partnership with the great ego that is hiding behind the little 
egos and is the ruler of them all. He must say: "I and 
the Father are one." He must lay hold of the secret force 
of the universe and wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled at Jab- 
bock, and never let go until it blesses him, and makes him a 
prince with God. The only possible religion is and must 
be based on a partnership between God and man. It was 
this egoism that gave the Israelite the leadership of religion 
in the Western world. He made himself partner with God 
in the business of life and in all transactions banked upon 
the unlimited ability of this partner to make up for his lack. 



104 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

It was this devotion of Israel to one God and the equal 
devotion of the one God to the one people that gave him his 
place in the world. The Greek had a genius for art, the 
Roman for politics, and the Israelite for religion. In the 
competition for religious supremacy at the close of the classic 
age the obscure god of this obscure people prevailed over 
all the gods of Greece and Rome. The Aryan dynasty 
gave place to the Semitic line of gods, of whom there are 
three who have attained to the rank of Major Gods. These 
are Jehovah, Jesus, and Mary. 

Jehovah is the spiritual ancestor of Jesus. His history 
is the story of the evolution of the War God of the Bene- 
Israel into the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. He 
is the First Person in the Holy Trinity of Christian theology. 



CHAPTER XXI 

The War God of the Bene-Israei 

In studying the evolution of religion, we have in every case 
to rely for our knowledge of its beginnings not upon authentic 
history, but upon myth and legend. This fact has nothing 
to do with the accuracy or extent of our knowledge, but only 
with the character of our evidence. Myth and legend are 
sometimes, — and, indeed, generally, — far more reliable sources 
of information in all that concerns the real life of a people 
than is the so-called authentic historical record. In myth 
and legend we have the naive account which the people give 
of themselves. In history we have this same people pre- 
sented to us through the medium of the mind of the historian. 
The folklore of a people is more valuable than their records; 
it is to the historian what fossils are to the geologist. Give 
us the stories that the shepherds tell at the camp-fire and we 
can reconstruct the life of a vanished people ; the rude pic- 
tures carved on the stones of a cave are witness to an age 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 105 

of the world. The mind of the historian is biased ; the myth- 
maker and the teller of legends only repeats what he hears. 
Schultz, in hs "Old Testament Theology," says : 

"When we read the myths and legends of a people we have 
our ear on the heart and our finger on the pulse of that 
people." 

The myths of a people record their infancy, their legends 
tell the story of their childhood, while their history is the 
record of their adult life. The myth is the story of the world 
as Dame Nature whispers it in the ears of a baby; legend is 
the same story as it is told to boys by boys around a camp- 
fire; history is that same story delivered by a professor in 
a classroom. 

In the life of the Israelitish people we find a woeful lack 
of mythology. When we first meet with them they have 
either passed out of their babyhood or they never had any. 
They have nothing to tell us of how the gods began and how 
the gods behaved. Their stories of creation are not their 
own but are borrowed very late in their career from a people 
richer in mythology than themselves. We are accustomed 
to think that the Bible is full of stories which we can tell to 
children ; and it is rich in stories that boys delight in, — stories 
of slaughter and adventure, — but not one single story that 
ought to be told to a boy under twelve, and hardly one that is 
fit for a girl to hear. 

But if the Israelitish people were lacking in myth, they 
were wonderfully rich in legend. The tales told at their 
camp-fires have become the imperishable literary treasure of 
the world. It is the story-telling genius of early Israel that 
has made of the heroes of Israel the heroes of mankind. 
Alexander, Caesar, Washington, and Napoleon, — each is the 
heroic figure of a given people. Moses, David, and Jesus are 
the heroes of humanity. So marvelous is the story-telling 
genius of this people that they have made the minor char- 
acters of their history, a Doeg and an Abiathar, more familiar 
to us than our next-door neighbor. 



106 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The unification of their tribal life in their tribal God has 
given to their history a dramatic power and unity that is without 
parallel. Jehovah is the Hamlet of their play. He makes 
his entrance on their stage as the War God of the Bene-Israel. 
He has all the implacability of the desert, and all the fierce- 
ness of the Arabian sun at noon. His hatred for all other 
tribes is evidence of his love for Israel. He makes war on 
Amelek from generation to generation ; he slaughters Moab 
while Moses holds up his hand, and will not let the sun go down 
until Joshua has killed the last of the fleeing Canaanites. 
He gives command to kill all the men, but to keep the women 
and children as slaves. This War God of the Bene-Israel is 
.far more savage than Ares or Mars, and has nothing of the 
joviality of Woden. War with this god is no pastime ; it 
is a bitter struggle to the death of the tribal god for tribal 
existence. He cannot indulge in the pleasures of the table 
or the bed ; he must leave wine and women alone that he 
may be fit to fight the battles of his people. The War God 
of the Bene-Israel has neither wife nor child; he is a lonely 
god, marching before his people by day and standing sentinel 
for them by night. 

This lonely god, without father or mother, without wife 
or children, was destined to play a great part in the spiritual 
life of the Western world. This loneliness, at first an accident 
of his career, became in the course of his evolution of the 
very essence of his nature. It abstracted from the God of 
Israel the phenomena and the scandal of sex. It made of 
him a male god and a bachelor god, to whom woman was an 
abomination. Any association of Jehovah with the notion of 
sex was blasphemy to Israel. The influence of that attitude 
of the War God of the Bene-Israel toward woman upon the 
religious life of the Western world has been tremendous. It 
has in a measure separated God from the world ; made of him 
not a father but a creator; it has introduced every kind of 
confusion into Western theology. To this day it is blas- 
phemy to think of God as a generator of life, as a father 
in any true sense of children; and all because Jehovah the War 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 107 

God of Israel had no use for women because they could not 
fight and no time for women because he had to fight. 

It was undoubtedly necessary for the due development of 
religion that the phenomena of sex should for the time being, 
be abstracted from the idea of God. Man, after coming to 
consciousness, has so mismanaged this great function, in his 
effort to regulate it, — has so involved it in foulness, making 
of it a shame, instead of glory, — that he had to lift his god 
out of all relation to this region of experience, in order that 
he might have for his god a respect that he could no longer 
have for himself. It was this freedom of Jehovah from all 
the confusion and corruption of sex that made him acceptable 
to a sex-weary world. 

The War God of the Bene-Israel has carried his warlike 
qualities with him through the whole course of his evolution. 
He has changed the mode of his warfare but never ceased 
from his battles. He is the principle of evolution in the 
universe, — that fierce figure crying: 

"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, 
And thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!" 
And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed 
Until the Nation had avenged itself of its enemies. 

That fierce god, I say, is still with us, sitting, like Caesar, 
in his lonely car, directing the course of the battle that rages 
in the universe for higher and better life. What we call 
peace is only a change in the region and the method of 
warfare. 



108 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XXII 

Jehovah: The Friend God of Abraham 

In the good old days before the Higher Criticism had come 
to disturb the minds of the simple, the Bible, to the ordinary 
reader, was one book beginning at Genesis and ending at 
Revelation. Each verse and chapter and book was supposed 
to be in its proper place in the order of time. It was known 
that the various books were written by different men, — Gen- 
esis by Moses and Revelation by John ; but that did not impair 
the unity of the Book, for, after all, Moses and John were 
only the penmen of the books bearing their names. The real 
author of all the books was God. The Bible as a whole was 
his autobiography, — the history of his dealings with the chil- 
dren of men, as told by himself. In this naive way the 
simple mind accounted for that dramatic unity which the 
Bible displays. The Bible begins with the creation and ends 
with the last judgment, and Jehovah occupies the middle of 
the stage, in both the first and last act, as creator and judge. 
There is no question as to this dramatic unity in the Bible. 
We have in it a continuous story of the evolution of the idea 
of God in the mind and soul of the Israelitish people. But 
this evolution is not nearly so orderly as it seems on the sur- 
face. The evolution itself was not in a straight line, but, 
like all evolutions, was spiral in its motion and constantly 
returning on itself. The notion of God as a Creator and Judge 
did not enter into the mind of the Bene-Israel as they wan- 
dered under the leadership of their war-god in the mountain 
defiles of Arabia. Such notions were far too abstract and 
recondite to find lodgment in their uncultivated minds. It 
was not until toward the end of their history, after they had 
come in contact and been impregnated with the thought of 
the highly developed civilization of Egypt and Babylon, that 
some unknown poet wrote the sublime poem of creation with 
which our Bible opens, and some priest living in Babylon 
compiled the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of 
Man out of the myths of the land of his captivity. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 109 

The earliest legendary lore of the people of Israel is to be 
found in the Books of Judges and Joshua and scattered here 
and there in Genesis and Exodus, without regard to historical 
order or logical setting. The story of Abraham, for instance, 
is much later in point of time than the story of Samson. 
The legend moves upon a much higher plane of thought and 
feeling. Samson is just the kind of man whom a half-savage 
desert tribe would deem a hero; he is the embodiment of 
brute strength, directed by brute cunning. Everything about 
him is outre and monstrous. Abraham on the other hand, is 
an Oriental gentleman, of fine manners and moderate speech, 
a man of vision, — a seeker after God. 

Whether Abraham holds the place in the relation to Israel 
that is assigned him in the legend is open to grave doubts. 
If Israel had a founder, then Israel himself is entitled to that 
honor. This people are well called the Sons of Israel, they 
are in every respect the children of their father; the same 
egoism, the same subtlety, the same patience, the same sub- 
lime faith in the main chance, are seen in the parent and 
the offspring. 

Abraham is a man so different in character that I am 
inclined to the belief that he is some stranger, coming from 
without the tribe, who recast the religion of Israel, giving 
it elements lacking to its original form, and moulding its savage 
principles to the uses of advancing civilization. But, how- 
ever this may be, — whether he was the founder of the tribe 
as the legend says, from whose altitude of thought and feeling 
the tribe rapidly descended until it reached the level of Jacob, 
or whether, as I surmise, he is some wayfaring man, joining 
the tribe of Israel and by his life and teaching, profoundly 
modifying its constitution and religion, or whether his is only 
an ideal evolved by the best thought of Israel as it passed 
from lower into higher barbarism and civilization, — let these 
things be as they may, yet to Abraham we owe that God 
than whom none has been so ennobling to the spiritual life 
of man. 

To Abraham God revealed himself in the guise of a friend. 
It was the companionship of God that Abraham valued ; other 



110 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

men sought after the gods because they were afraid of them, 
or because they wanted the gods to do something for them. 
Abraham left his land, his kindred, and his father's house, 
not knowing whither he went, only that he might enjoy, un- 
disturbed, the company of God. When he comes to the 
mountains of Lebanon he is not afraid of their wild defiles, 
nor does he shun their steep ascent, for they are the ante- 
chambers of Jehovah, and he calls the name of that place 
Jehova Jireh, "as it is said to this day, in the mount of the 
Lord it shall be seen." 

This conception of God as a friend was impregnated with 
the loneliness of the shepherd life and the austerity of the 
desert. Driving his flock from oasis to oasis, through the 
sands, hiding them from the noonday heat in the shadow of 
some great rock in that weary land, watching over them by 
night when earth and sky were as still as a stone, the soul of 
the man was impressed with the awful loneliness of the univ- 
erse ; the stars and the grains of shifting sand, each one by 
itself, with no one to speak to in all the wide, wide world. 
And the soul of man alone in this terrible stillness with its 
pent-up thoughts and heart-breaking emotions ! 

It was out of this infinite loneliness that the friend God 
came. Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw him walking 
across the desert toward the place where he sat under the oaks 
of Mamre, and when he saw him Abraham rose and made 
haste and ran to meet him and brought him in and made him 
sit in the shade of the oak at the tent door ; he brought water 
for his feet and oil for his head ; with eager hospitality Abra- 
ham ran to the herd and found a calf of a year old and killed 
it and made savory meat for his guest. And sitting there, 
cross-legged, this God talked with Abraham as a friend with 
his friend. 

And of all the gods there is none like him, none so welcome 
to the soul of man. God the Creator, God the Saviour, God 
the Judge, God the Wisdom, God the Power, may be all very 
well, but as for me, I would give them all for one hour with 
God the Friend, — just some one to speak to in this vast void 
of life ; some one to sit with me in the door of my tent and 
pass with me the time of day. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 111 

Loneliness is of the very warp and woof of human life. 
Each one of us is born alone and dies alone ; each conscious- 
ness is wrapped in eternal secrecy, not the wife of the bosom, 
nor the child of the loins can dispel the silence that reigns 
in the soul. We talk of things and things and things, but 
of our very inner self we cannot talk, for we ourselves do not 
know ourself well enough to talk to ourself. And if we 
talk, who can hear? There is an ocean of silence between 
soul and soul, just as there is an ocean of darkness between- 
star and star. 

Is this silence to which we listen the silence of hate or the 
silence of love, the silence of hope or the silence of despair? 
Is there in it one friendly voice that can speak to us and dispel 
this loneliness that is driving us mad? Has our soul a soul- 
friend in the universe that can share its joys and soothe its 
sorrows? It was to find this friend that Abraham left Ur 
of the Chaldees and wandered "lonely as a cloud" through the 
hills of Syria, and counted his wanderings as nothing if his 
Friend God walked with him by the way and sat with him at 
eventide in the door of his tent. 

This Friend God has done more to comfort the soul of man 
than all the other gods put together. W f hen once we have 
seen him, we can never be the same afterwards. He is 
within us and yet without us. We sit in our soul and look 
in his face. He is not our god, he is our guest ; we wash 
his feet and anoint his head and give him savory food. We 
do not ask anything of him, only companionship, only to know 
that he is there. 

Each soul must make friends with this god for himself. 
He is not to be found in temple or in church ; he is not the 
God of the creed nor of an organization. To ask a priest 
to pray to him on our behalf is a blasphemous doubt of his 
friendship. We cannot buy his friendship with gifts of money 
nor with flattering word. It is friendship for friendship, or 
it is nothing. "My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the 
living God. When shall I come to appear before the pres- 
ence of God?" 



112 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XXIII 
The Bargain God of Jacob 

In primitive religious thought the relation of a man to his 
god was organic. This relationship was founded upon the 
principle of generation. Nowhere in archaic thought do we 
find the gods creating; everywhere we behold them gener- 
ating. The gods themselves are generated out of the forces 
of nature and they in turn generate divine men. The Eupat- 
ridae of Greece and the Patricians of Rome trace their des- 
cent from a god as easily as an Englishman derives his origin 
from a Norman who came over with the Conqueror, or an 
American from one of the prolific passengers who sailed from 
Plymouth in the Mayflower. If one did not have at least one 
god or goddess growing on one's family tree one had little to 
boast of in the way of ancestry. Caesar was a god by inher- 
itance as well as by acquirement ; he had no less a personage 
than Venus for his greatest great-grandmother. The deifica- 
tion of ancestors, which was the universal custom of the ar- 
chaic world, made divine paternity an essential article of 
faith in the religion of that world. The household gods were 
the fathers of the house, and the city gods the progenitors of 
the founders of the city. 

This relationship by generation made the people secure in 
the love and favor of the gods. In taking care of his people 
a god was taking care of his own. This house was his 
house and these children were his children, not by legal right 
but by process of nature. The house was founded upon his 
bones, and the children generated by his blood. For such a 
god to neglect his people was a disgrace to his divinity. Men 
called on their gods as children call on their parents, knowing 
that gods, like parents, have nothing else to do than to answer 
the cries of their children. 

As one reflects upon this archaic belief, one cannot but 
wonder at its subtlety and essential truthfulness. When man 
looked out upon his world and took note of its ways he saw 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 113 

that generation was the law of life; he saw that the fishes of 
the sea, the birds of the air, all creeping things, and beasts 
and cattle and men and women were each and every one of 
them like poets, born and not made, each new life proceeding 
from an antecedent life. There was no beginning and there 
was no end, but an eternal round. The gods as well as men 
came each into being by this process of generation. Thus 
did the human mind, before it was sophisticated, anticipate 
the last analysis of science and see in generative evolution 
the process by which all things have come to be as they are. 

It is a distinct decline from this high plain of thought to 
that conception of the relation of a man to his god which 
has ruled so long in the religion of the Western world. Ac- 
cording to our way of thinking God did not generate man, 
he manufactured him. Man did not spring out of the loins 
of God, he was simply the work of his hands. There was 
no divine urge, no secret love in the universe demanding the 
conception and birth of man. No antecedent courtship of 
force with force, of passion with passion, had brought man to 
the birth ; he was never born at all, he was just made. 

The gods having nothing else to do said : "Go to ! let us 
make man \" and they made him. Man was the creature and 
God the creator, and between these two there was no organic 
relation either of origin or affection. This notion that man 
is the creation of God's hands has in the modern Western 
world utterly supplanted the archaic notion that man is the 
child of God's loins. 

The conflict that has raged for the last five-hundred years 
between science and religion is occasioned by this funda- 
mental difference in the conception of the universe. The war 
is waging between the archaic theory of generative evolution 
and the later theory of creationism. The one theory declares 
that God is a father, the other that he is a manufacturer; 
and between these two theories there can be no compromise. 

The creationist theory came naturally to the Israelitish 
thinkers of the IX Century B. C. They had from the first 
eliminated the notion of generation from their conception of 
God. Abraham was their father, not Jehovah. Not for 



114 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

one moment do they conceive of Abraham as in the same 
class with Jehovah ; Abraham is a man, Jehovah is a god, 
and a man is not a god nor a god a man, nor did the Hebrew 
thinker ever confuse the one with the other. If for the 
sake of completeness he carries the generations of Abra- 
ham back to Adam, there all generation stops, for Adam 
is not generated, he is made. The abstraction of the phe- 
nomenon of sex from the conception of God by the Israelite 
has put man and God into worlds as distinct as the world of 
the potter and the world of the pot. 

But this theory has never been satisfactory; it does not 
account for facts. The pot cannot talk back to the potter, 
but man has always talked back to God. It is of the very 
essence of a god that a man should be able to reason with 
him. The great thinkers of Israel could never hew straight 
to the line of their theory ; they constantly veer away from 
the thought of God the Creator to the conception of God the 
Father. In order to reconcile these two theories, they affirm 
that while Israel is not God's son by generation, he is God's 
son by adoption. The relation between man and God is not 
a natural ; it is a legal relation ; it is a matter of a bargain 
and sale ; it is a chaffering in the market, a contract between 
parties of the first and second part. 

This legal relation of man to God finds naive expression 
in the story of Jacob at Bethel. Jacob, having cheated his 
brother Esau out of his birthright, found it expedient to leave 
home until his brother's anger had time to cool. And Jacob 
went out from Beersheba and went towards Haran, and there 
were no Pullman cars in those days, nor hotels by the way. 
And Jacob lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all 
night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones 
of the place and put it under his head for a pillow and lay 
down in the place to sleep. 

'And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth,... 
and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon 
it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it and said: T am the 
Lord God of Abraham thy father and the God of Isaac ; the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 115 

land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy 
seed...' And Jacob awaked out of his sleep... And he was 
afraid, and said : 'How dreadful is this place ! this is none 
other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven....' 
And Jacob vowed a vow, saying: 'If God will be with me, 
and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me 
bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to 
my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.... 
And of all that thou shalt give me surely I will surely give 
the tenth unto thee.' " x 

In this classical passage we have set forth that contrac- 
tual relation between man and God which has so powerfully 
influenced the religious thought of the Western world. Jacob 
makes his bargain with God ; it is so much for so much, and 
true to his racial instincts, Jacob gets the best of the bargain. 
We find implied in the contract the inveterate belief of the 
ancient world that the existence of the gods is dependent 
upon the worship of man. No worshipper, no God ! Here is 
a god without a worshipper. Esau has already forsaken him 
and gone over to the gods of his wife, who was of the 
daughters of Heth. Jehovah's hope for future existence rests 
entirely with Jacob. Jacob takes advantage of his god's 
necessity and drives a hard bargain. If God will take care 
of him, he will take care of God : and of all that God gives 
him he will give God a tenth. 

This contract of Jacob with Jehovah has given to the re- 
ligion of the Hebrew its distinctive place in the religious his- 
tory of the world. Israel were the people of the covenant, 
and Jehovah was the God of the covenant. You do your part, 
I will do mine. You worship me, and I will take care 
of you. 

This Bargain God of Jacob is not nearly so noble a divinity 
as the God of the House, or the God of the City. The House 
God cared for the house because he loved the house, the City 
God because he loved the city; but in the contract between 

1 Genesis, xxviii : 13-22. 



116 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Jehovah and Jacob there is no word concerning love, it is 
a matter of business. Jehovah needs a worshipper and Jacob 
needs a god ; they meet and strike their bargain, and they 
both live up to it. Jacob worships Jehovah, and Jehovah 
blesses Jacob. 

This contractual conception of religion, sordid as it seems, 
has been the pregnant, moving thought of the most successful 
religion known to the human race. It rests religion not 
upon necessity but upon freedom. I may not choose my 
father, but I may choose my god. It is this element of free- 
dom in the religion of the Western world that has given it 
its expansive power; the gods cannot sit down and take 
their ease ; they are not hereditary gods holding office for 
eternity; they are elective gods chosen by the people and 
rejected by the people. Unless the gods meet in a measure 
the expectations of the people the people vote them out of 
office and choose new gods in their room. 

On the other hand, the people cannot presume on the favor 
of the gods as children do on the softness of the parent. The 
god of the contract is not to be trifled with, he knows and you 
know the terms of the covenant, and if you break it, that is 
the end of the relation between you and your god. 

The terms of the contract being made by mutual consent 
may be changed by the same authority. This fact gives to 
a religion based upon covenant a progressive element that 
prevents its stagnation. As man increases in wisdom he 
can make new and greater demands upon God ; as the heart 
of man softens and enlarges, God can ask of that heart a 
greater, holier worship. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 117 

CHAPTER XXIV 
The God of the Working Class 

According to its legendary history the Bene-Israel, driven 
by famine, went down into Egypt and, with the consent of 
the rulers, settled in one of its outlying provinces. 

The rapid multiplication of this people and their solidarity 
made them a constant menace to the integrity of the kingdom of 
the Pharaohs. 

As to-day the Russian fears the active mind of the Jew, so 
in the earlier period, according to the story, the Egyptian 
Pharaohs felt uneasy in the presence of the same prolific, 
intelligent, and acquisitive race. This people was subjected 
to persecution then, as now ; we are told that their male chil- 
dren were killed at the birth by order of the king and the 
adult male population was employed by the government in 
the brick-yards, where they were exposed to unwholesome 
conditions and to destroying hardships ; being whipped and 
starved by their task-masters. 

This mode of treatment did not arrest the increase of the 
people. It is the characteristic of Israel that the more you 
persecute him the more he thrives. The only effect of the 
policy of Egypt was to inflame the anger of these slaves 
against their masters, intensify their tribal consciousness, 
and consolidate their tribal organization. The real and ac- 
cepted rulers of Israel at that time, as so often again in 
their history, were not the princes of Egypt, but the Elders 
of Israel. The tribes seem to have maintained their organ- 
ization intact throughout the long period of their Egyptian 
bondage. 

As a consequence of their oppression, this working class 
in Egypt was in a chronic condition of unrest ; agitators 
moved secretly among them, stirring their minds to rebellion, 
recalling to them the days of their freedom, when they had 
fed their flocks and kept their herds in the land of Syria. 
After their hard day's work was over, they gathered in their 
meeting-places and heard from the lips of their Elders the 



118 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

{{£#£&. ". 

story of that land which was theirs, because their God had 
promised it to their father Abraham and to his seed forever. 
Thus this downtrodden people were fed upon the hope of 
deliverance, and their spirits were kept alive. It only needed 
some fresh infliction, some fouler insult, some bolder leader- 
ship, to set this mass of slaves moving away from their cap- 
tivity out into freedom. 

These necessary conditions of successful revolt were not 
long in coming. The killing of the male children at birth, 
the increasing arrogance of the slave-masters, prepared the 
fuel for the burning, and at last the fire was kindled. 

According to their legend, one of their number had been 
lifted by accident out of his slave environment and incorpor- 
ated into the free, ruling class. Educated in the palace of 
the king, this born slave was instructed in all wisdom of the 
Egyptians ; he was reckoned as the son of Pharaoh's daughter 
and was entitled to and exercised all the privileges of this 
princely estate. 

At this time the religion of Egypt was highly organized 
and exceedingly attractive. The worship of the generative 
forces of nature, incarnate in the Sacred Buil Amon, was re- 
fined by ritual and rationalized by doctrine. Nature worship 
was practiced in the adoration of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, in 
whose history we have the eternal story of birth, marriage, 
and death told in hieroglyphic. In the worship of the Sun- 
god Ra, noble aspirations of the Egyptian soul found 
expression. The Egyptians of that age had attained to a cul- 
ture and civilization not unlike our own ; they were a military 
power of the first rank, engaged extensively in commerce; 
their cities were numerous and populous, and they were oc- 
cupied in building temples and tombs which have ever since 
been the wonders of the world. They believed in a future 
life, conditioned upon the resurrection of the body, and mum- 
mified their dead that the body might be ready for use when 
the tombs were opened and the graves gave up their dead. 

If we may believe their legends, this man of Israel, of the 
sub-tribe of Levi, was in this civilization, but not of it. As 
he grew to manhood in the palace of the Pharaohs he looked 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 119 

out on all this seething life, with its multiplicity of gods, with 
its swarming priests, with its proud princes and oppressed 
people, and condemned it all as vain and unworthy. His 
heart was not in this life of splendor, he felt within that 
heart the call of his blood. Visiting the brick-yards, his 
indignation was aroused at the sight of the cruelties inflicted 
on his people, and seeing an Egyptian beating an Israelite, he 
killed the Egyptian and hid his corpse in the sand. Return- 
ing and finding two of the Hebrew slaves quarreling, he re- 
buked them with the noble words : 

"Sirs, ye are brethren. Why do ye wrong one another ?" 

With this the slaves twitted him with the murder of the 
Egyptian, upon which, fearing for his life, despairing of his 
people, he fled the land of Egypt, went over into the region 
of North Arabia and became, as his fathers had been before 
him, a keeper of sheep. 

When this man escaped into the wilderness he became a 
man without a people and a man without a god. The gods 
of Egypt had found no lodgment in his life, and the God of 
Israel was a dead god, forgotten out of mind. During their 
long sojourn in Egypt the Bene-Israel had neglected the 
worship of their War God, Jehovah ; they had no use for him 
because of the unwarlike character of their lives. They 
were held together by their common oppression and their 
Elders repeated to them from generation to generation the 
legends of their fathers, and they knew their God, — not as 
their god, but as the god of their fathers, the God of Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob. 

Moses, the son of Amram of the tribe of Levi, knew these 
legends by heart, and he brooded over them in the wilderness. 
As the heart of Moses had not been in the palace of Memphis, 
so it was not in the wilderness of Zin ; it was all the time 
with the children of his people, bearing their griefs and shar- 
ing their sorrows. He grew from a young man into an old 
man, but he never forgot the iniquity of Egypt. The indig- 
nation of his heart against that iniquity was as hot at seventy 
as it was at thirty. Then his heart becomes a human volcano 
in which are pent-up the explosive forces of religion. The 



120 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Lord God of his fathers meets with him; the old name Je- 
hovah, almost forgotten, is revived in his memory. He re- 
ceives command from that God to go down into Egypt and 
lead his people out of bondage into the land of promise. 

Thus did the God Jehovah declare himself to be the God 
of the Working Class, and thus was Moses constituted a div- 
inely inspired labor leader. This labor leadership of Moses 
is not to be compared with modern labor leadership, from 
which it differs not in degree but in kind. It was essentially 
religious and unselfish. 

His first mission was to the working class itself. He went 
into the brick-yards and preached the doctrine of divine dis- 
content, he stirred the hearts of these laborers with a burning 
sense of their wrongs and inspired them with a hope of deliv- 
erance. No labor agitator of modern times can compare with 
Moses in the effectiveness of his propaganda. He recalled 
the Israelites to their ancient religion, he made them choose 
between Pharaoh and Jehovah, he fired them with a fanatical 
zeal, he made their tasks hateful to them, and out of this 
erstwhile mass of patient laborers raised up a band of earnest 
war-men. 

And when he was called before Pharaoh he pitted his God 
against all the gods of Egypt. No syndicalist, no direct ac- 
tionist of modern times, is in the same class with Moses in 
the fierceness of his sabotage. 1 He literally kicked Pha- 
raoh into the Red Sea. But before this final outrage he turned 
the dust of Egypt into lice, its air into flies, its water into 
blood ; he smote its young and old with boils, he killed its 
cattle with the murrain, beat down its growing grain with 
the hail, and by his religious magic slew all the first-born 
of Egypt in a night. 

This labor leader was uncompromising: he would listen to 
no terms; and when Pharaoh said: "The people can go but 
not their cattle," Moses answered : "Not an hoof shall be 
left behind." 

Leaving Pharaoh, this man went down to the brick makers 
1 Sabot, *a wooden shoe ; sabotage, the act of kicking with that shoe. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 121 

and led them out on strike, and when Pharaoh followed after, 
both he and his army were drowned in the sea. 

Such is the story of the most successful labor strike in 
history. It ended forever the bondage of Israel to Egypt and 
made of these slaves a free and aspiring people. The salient 
fact of this history is that the god Jehovah is the God of the 
Working Class ; he espouses their cause in opposition to the 
ruling leisure class ; he has no regard whatever for the con- 
stitution of the kingdom of Egypt ; the vested rights of the 
Pharaohs in the labor of his people is to him a vested wrong, 
to be wiped out in blood. As the Egyptians have robbed the 
Israelities, so in turn, by the command of Jehovah, the Israel- 
ites spoil the Egyptians. 

Having chosen the working class for his people, the god 
Jehovah has remained true to them to the present day. As 
the old Greek dynasty was the dynasty of the gods of the 
leisure class, so this Semitic dynasty founded in Jehovah is 
the dynasty of the gods of the working class. Jesus and 
Joseph as well as Jehovah are born of the working class, 
are the advocates of the working class, are the leaders of the 
working class. 

The trouble with the labor movement in the modern world 
is that it is without spiritual inspiration, — without religious 
leadership. It has no god. It is not a struggle for spiritual 
but for economic betterment ; it is not a question of the sover- 
eignty of labor but of the wages of labor. It is a series of 
small compromises secured at great cost. The labor leaders 
for the most part have no outlook; they have not had the 
training of Moses in the palace nor in the wilderness; they 
are mere opportunists, men of their day drifting with their 
time. They do not know that their gods have been stolen 
from them and are used against them. They need a Moses 
who will stand before the Pharaohs of the world in the name 
of the Lord God Jehovah, and claim the rights of labor as 
inalienable, divine rights, not to be voided by time, not to 
be hindered by vested interests, not to be strangled by law, 
but that forever a man shall have the right to enjoy to the 
full the product of the labor of his brain and his hand. 



122 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Fine rhetoric ! we may say. Yes, it is fine rhetoric ; but 
the book that Christians call their Bible is choke-full of such 
rhetoric ; and unless they can stomach it they must disgorge 
it and abjure the God whom they worship and deny the Holy 
Name by which they are called. 

We shall see later that the Western world is brought face 
to face with the alternative of either rejecting its gods or 
revolutionizing its economic system. It professes to believe 
in the Jehovah-Jesus, God of the Semitic dynasty, and »this is 
the God of the Working Class, who is on the side of the 
poor as against the rich ; on the side of the weak as against 
the strong; on the side of the oppressed as against the op- 
pressor. When labor hears again the voice of its God and 
enters upon the struggle for its rights, — not in the timorous, 
half-hearted manner of the past, but moving en masse, urged 
by a mighty religious impulse, from the present basis of prop- 
erty-right to the new basis of human right, with the God 
of the Working Class in the forefront of the army, — then old 
things will pass away and all things will become new. We 
are in the midst of such a revolution to-day, and one of its 
early results will be the restoration of the Jehovah-Jesus, 
God of the Working Class, to his leadership of the labor 
movement. 

This conception of God is the outcome of the age-long 
struggle of the working class against the social arrangements 
that have kept it in bondage. When the working class is 
redeemed, the work of the Jehovah-Jesus God will have been 
accomplished. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 123 

CHAPTER XXV 

The Tent God of the Bene-Israel 

That the religious life of mankind is profoundly modified 
by changing economic, social, and political condition is ex- 
emplified in the account of the exodus of the Bene-Israel from 
Egypt, their journeys in the Wilderness, and their settle- 
ment in Palestine. It is not necessary that we accept the 
details of that story as historical ; it is all the more valuable 
because it is legendary. It tells of a tragic effort to organize 
the tribes of the Bene-Israel into a nation and to give them 
a stable form of government. 

After crossing the Red Sea these fugitives were in all the 
disorder of flight: loosely arranged according to tribes, but 
without any center of unity or principle of coherence. The 
only authority to which the people as a whole gave heed was 
that of Moses their leader. This man, during the earlier 
period of the migration, was sole king and judge in Israel. 
What little government there was Moses administered ; not 
only was he responsible for the general welfare, he was also 
called upon to settle every little dispute between man 
and man. 

After a weary march through the desert Moses would 
go out and stand in the midst of the camp, and all the people 
would come to him to settle their quarrels. It was impossible 
that one man could do justice to himself and to the people 
under such a strain. This one-man government was absurd 
and futile, and it only needed some disinterested person to 
come that way and point out this absurdity and futility, to 
bring it to an end. 

Fortunately for all concerned, Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, 
came from Midian to visit his now famous son-in-law. He 
had at first very little pleasure from his visit, for Moses was 
so busy all day long and far into the night that he had no 
time to sit down in the tent door and talk over old times. 

One evening, when Moses had been gone all day, he came 
to his tent and lay down on the ground from utter exhaustion. 
Jethro looked at him and asked : 



124 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

"Moses, what have you been doing all day?" 

And Moses answered : 

"I have been judging the people." 

'And how do you judge the people?" 

"I go out and stand in the midst of the camp, and all the 
people come to me for judgment." 

"What— all the people?" 

"Yes; all the people." 

"With every little thing?" 

"Yes, with every little thing." 

"But why do you try to do all this?" 

"Because I am the only man in the camp that can do it." 

"Excuse me, Moses," said Jethro, "but you are the only 
man in the camp who cannot do it. You are a great prophet 
and a great leader. Upon you rests the safety of all this 
people. If you wear yourself out as you are doing, you will 
break down, and the people, without leadership, will be lost 
in the Wilderness. What you need is organization. Appoint 
captains over tens and captains over fifties and captains over 
hundreds and captains over thousands, and let these captains 
judge all the minor matters, while you reserve to yourself 
the decision of the important questions that concern the well- 
being of the whole congregation." 

Moses sat up and said: 

"Jethro, you are right. I will do it." 

And he did ; which shows that even a prophet of God cat) 
learn wisdom from a simple man. Moses had been trying 
not only to act for Jehovah but also to usurp the functions 
of the Elders of Israel. His mode of personal government 
had no warrant in the past history of the people. In modern 
phrase: "it was unconstitutional." 

From the beginning each sub-tribe of the Bene-Israel had 
been ruled by the Elders of that tribe, the only principle of 
unification recognized by all the sub-tribes was the tribal god, 
Jehovah, who was both judge and king in Israel. From the 
earliest period the Bene-Israel had lived under a loose theoc- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 125 

racy and followed such leaders as were from time to time 
commissioned by Jehovah to meet a special occasion. It 
was this theocratic form of government that Moses reestab- 
lished in the Wilderness, giving to it a new spirit and a new 
symbol. 

The people of Israel were arranged according to their tribes ; 
the settlement of all disputes within the tribes were com- 
mitted to the Elders of that tribe. These men resumed once 
more their constitutional function of judgment, — Moses acting 
as a court of appeal in greater matters. And from this time 
Moses sedulously refused to be anything more than the 
spokesman of Jehovah. The God of the tribe was the king 
of the tribe. This god was no longer far away in the moun- 
tain, his presence was with his people ; wherever they went 
he went ; when they marched he marched ; when they camped 
he camped. 

The tent of Jehovah was in the midst of the tents of Israel. 
The tribe of Levi was taken to be the body-guard of the great 
king. The tribe of Joseph became the two tribes of Manasseh 
and Ephraim. The twelve tribes in marching and in camping 
were in a hollow square : three tribes to the North, three tribes 
to the South, three tribes to the East, and three tribes to the 
West, and in the midst of that square was the tent of Jehovah, 
guarded day and night by the men of Levi. And all the 
movements of the people were regulated by this divine pres- 
ence. When the tent of Jehovah was taken down the people 
took up their journey; when the tent was set up the people 
rested. Not in all the religious history of the world is there 
a more significant symbol than this tent of the God of Israel 
in the midst of the tents of Israel. There was no image in that 
tent, only a light burning; it was the invisible, inaudible spirit 
of Israel, the soul of the people, that was symbolized by the 
tent. Israel was not unified in anything, it was unified in 
itself. The people pressed upon the people and became one 
in their union with their tribal God whom they had chosen 
as their king. 

This principle of government is universal : true government 
is not external to a people; it cannot be made out of hand; 



126 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

it is a growth. Each people grows its own government as 
each body grows its own skeleton. Government is the 
product of the soul of a people : as a people think so are 
they ruled. With changing thoughts come changing forms. 
We see various kinds of governments in the world to-day, 
each expressing the spirit of its people ; some are crustacean 
(such as the Empire of Russia and the Republic of the United 
States), and grow their bones on the outside, and some are 
vertebrates (like the English) and grow their skeletons on the 
inside. Every government is expressive of the soul of the 
people in its present stage of advancement. Violent changes 
are never lasting. 

"My Lords and Gentlemen," said Chief Justice Hale to the 
Lords and Commons of England, when, after the death of 
Cromwell, there was talk of bringing back the king, — "my 
Lords and Gentlemen, the laws of England have always run 
in the name of the King, Lords, and Commons, and that the 
laws of England may be the more easily administered I give 
my voice to the bringing back the king." 

And they brought back the king, — even so sorry a king as 
Charles II of unsavory memory, — because the soul of England 
had made the king essential. And it is so even to this day: 
England is unified in the crown as Israel was unified in 
the tent. 

The tent of Jehovah in the midst of the tents of Israel 
made so profound an impression on the imagination of Israel, 
— and through Israel upon the religious imagination of the 
Western world, — that it has always been used as the symbol 
of the presence of God in the midst of his people. When 
One came of whom men said: "He is God in the flesh, God 
in the midst of His people," they harked back to the Wilder- 
ness and said of Him words that will never die: 

Ka: 6 Xo^qg :ac^ syivexo xal sjxijvwjev sv r,[Llv l 

In this manner the tented Jehovah led his people through 

the wilderness and gave them the land of their fathers. With 

And the word was made flesh and was tented among us. — John i : 14. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 127 

their settlement in that land, they changed their mode of life; 
they were no longer shepherds and herdsmen, wandering from 
place to place, they were farmers dwelling each man under 
his own vine and fig tree. The people no longer lived in tents, 
they built themselves houses. But while the people lived in 
houses Jehovah still dwelt in his tent which was pitched in 
Shiloh. The conservatism of the God did not keep pace with 
the advance of the people, — it never does. When every 
institution is changing, religion is the last to change. 

It was, however, discovered in time that the old theocratic 
government was not adequate to the new conditions. The 
people of Israel, in dealing with the settled governments 
about them, could no longer trust to the sporadic leadership 
of men raised up for the occasion, so they demanded a king 
who could go out before them to battle. After a bitter resist- 
ance and warning, the prophet Samuel, who represented the 
old order, gave them their king, — first Saul and then David ; 
but the King did not reign in his own right ; he was the vicar 
of Jehovah, who was still and must always be king in Israel. 
Both king and people held tenaciously to the theocratic con- 
ception of government. Saul was overthrown because he 
displeased Jehovah, whereupon David was chosen as a man 
after Jehovah's own heart. 

When David took the stronghold of the Jebusites on Mount 
Zion and called the name of it Jerusalem and made it the 
seat of his government, he, toward the end of his career, 
reproached himself with the thought that while he dwelt in a 
house of cedar, Jehovah still lived in a tent, and he was 
minded to wipe out this disgrace and build a house for Je- 
hovah in Jerusalem. At first the God refused to change his 
manner of life ; but, after persuasion, consented, and David 
made preparation for the building of a house for Jehovah, — a 
house that Solomon completed and dedicated; and from that 
time Jehovah made his home in Jerusalem. 

This change of residence from the tent to the house was 
significant of past economic, social, and political changes 
and of such changes to come. The people of Israel had 
radically altered their mode of life : they were agricultural and 



128 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

not pastoral. A passion for their land had in a measure 
taken the place of a passion for their people. Jehovah be- 
came the God of the Land more than the God of the People. 
In that land he ruled, in that land he must live. When once 
his house was built in Jerusalem, then that became his per- 
manent place of residence.. All of the gods of the ancient 
world were confined to their cities; no god ever went abroad 
to visit for any length of time ; for he was the god of his city, 
and if he left his city, he lost his divinity. 

In the case of Jehovah, this identification of the God with 
the city was absolute ; it was disastrous, as we shall see, 
to the unity of Israel, but it was of advantage to the religion 
of Israel as a whole. What the tent had been the city be- 
came; it was the center of unity, the principle of coherence. 
The tribes that severed their connection with the holy city 
were lost ; the tribe of which that city was the center was 
saved. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

Jehovah The Righteous 

It is the weakness of the theocratic form of government, 
whether in church or state, that the divine sovereign can 
never reign in person. He must always rule through a vicar, 
and, whether this vicar be king or pope, he is, too frequently, 
apt to be but a sorry representative of his celestial Lord. 
Men of godlike mould are few and far between. They are 
seldom or never born in the purple, nor do they easily ac- 
quire office in the existing order. Princes, whether of church 
or state, are often commonplace, of mediocre ability, and 
lacking initiative. Great leaders of the people, — men of divine 
stature like Jesus and Lincoln, — are more frequently found 
in the ranks of the people. The greatness of humanity is in 
the mass, seldom in the class. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 129 

The theocracy established by Moses was no exception to 
this rule. As long as Moses lived, Israel might well be- 
lieve that it was under the direct government of its God ; 
for Moses in the intensity of his will, in the clearness of his 
intelligence, in the justice of his rule, was all that might be 
expected of a god. He did his best, and a god can do no 
better. 

After the death of Moses, Joshua carried on the tra- 
ditions of his administration. Joshua was an heroic 
leader of the people, — sagacious and successful in war, wise 
and just in peace. When he had subdued the Canaanites 
and other hill tribes of Palestine and appropriated their lands, 
he divided those lands equitably among the people, man by 
man and family by family, taking for himself only his por- 
tion; — no less and no more than was allotted to the humblest 
man of Israel. After the death of Joshua the people of 
Israel, being without leadership, were the easy prey of the 
Philistines and the Sidonians, from whom they were from 
time to time delivered by such heroes as Gideon and Jephtha, 
— men who might well be looked upon as representatives of 
the power of Jehovah. 

With the establishment of the kingdom, all this was 
changed. The anointed of Jehovah might be any weakling 
born in the palace. The first three kings had a certain meas- 
ure of greatness which might entitle them to be considered 
the visible representatives of the invisible king. Saul, in 
physical proportions, in religious enthusiasm, in generosity of 
soul, was a man not wholly unworthy to sit in the seat of 
judgment and rule in the name of Jehovah. But he was 
lacking in firmness of will. He would and he wouldn't; 
he allowed Samuel to browbeat him and David to outwit 
him. These defects were fatal to his rule. A god must 
never be a weakling and he must never be a fool ; and what a 
god must not be, his vicar cannot be; and, as Saul was both 
weak of will and feeble of understanding, he was rejected 
by Jehovah. 

David, who succeeded him, was chosen by Jehovah for 
those qualities of mind and heart which mark the natural 



130 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

leader: unflinching purpose that knows when to kill and when 
not to kill ; ability to seize every opportunity and make the 
most of it; the faculty of making and using friends; a relig- 
iosity that approves itself to the crowd, and withal a genius 
that embodies and expresses the soul of a people. It is not 
without cause that David is one of the heroes of humanity 
who are chosen of the gods to do their work in the world. 

In his private life David was an Oriental ; he despised 
women and used them for his pleasure ; the only one he ever 
loved was the wife of Uriah the Hitite. And it was just 
this one love that Jehovah condemned, being as it was a viola- 
tion of the property right of Uriah in the person of his wife. 
The reign of David was the golden age of the Kingdom of 
Israel, and the best that Jehovah could promise after that 
reign was that a son of David should sit upon his throne 
forever. 

Solomon, the son and successor of David, was a love 
child, — the son of Bathsheba, an adulteress ; but that did not 
prevent Jehovah from giving him a wisdom that has immor- 
talized him in all the lands of the East. To him are ascribed 
all the wise sayings of all the wise men for generations before 
and after him. He was a naturalist, a philosopher, and a 
poet. He has the credit of writing the one love story in the 
Bible and of producing the greatest essay of pessimistic phil- 
osophy ever given to the world. We need not believe that 
the Song of Solomon or Koheleth are the work of Solomon; 
we only need believe that men thought them his work and in 
keeping with his character. 

In his private life Solomon was an Oriental despot, — with 
his harem of three hundred wives and a thousand concubines. 
The expenses of his court were a great burden upon the 
people, and the temple that he built in Jerusalem absorbed 
the wealth of the nation. 

Before Solomon died, the northern tribes were in a state 
of revolt. The removal of the Ark of Jehovah to Jerusalem ; 
the exaltation of the tribe of Judah as the custodians of the 
Ark above the other tribes ; the subjection of the priests and 
the Levites to the king, together with the exactions of the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 131 

tax-gatherers and the insolence of the officials, kept the whole 
of the north country in a state of chronic discontent. The 
contemptuous rejection by Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, 
of the petition for reform, caused Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, 
to raise the standard of revolt, to cry: "To your tents, O 
Israel !" and make of revolt revolution. The ten tribes 
seceded, and only the tribe of Judah and the little tribe of 
Benjamin were left to the House of David. 

For a time the tribal God Jehovah was claimed by each of 
the rival factions. But unity of worship was lost with unity 
of tribal life. In spite of the denunciation of such men as 
Elijah and Elisha, the northern tribes gradually drifted away 
from their loyalty to Jehovah and adopted the gods of the 
surrounding people, being finally swept into captivity by the 
Chaldeans, thus losing their tribal identity. 

The effect of all this upon the fortunes of Jehovah is man- 
ifest. He had ceased to be the God of Israel and had become 
the God of the Jew. The little tribe of Benjamin was merged 
with the greater tribe, and only Judah was left of all the tribes 
of Israel to keep alive the worship of Jehovah. Never was 
a god in greater danger of extinction. That the cult of 
Jehovah survived this disaster and in due time absorbed all 
the cults of the Western world, — so that Jehovah is to-day 
the chief God of the reigning religious dynasty, — is owing to 
a concatenation of circumstances so wonderful that it is not 
strange that men have ascribed the glory of Jehovah to the 
power of Jehovah. 

The first of these circumstances in importance is the evolu- 
tion of Jehovah from the Tribe-God of the Bene-Israel into 
the God of the Moral Order. This evolutionary process was 
largely the work of a single great thinker, one of the greatest 
that the human race has produced, Isaiah, the son of Amoz, 
who found Jehovah the Tribe-God of Israel and left him for 
all time the God of the Moral Order of Humanity. 

This poet and statesman, Isaiah, lived in the middle of the 
Eighth Century before our era. He was, according to tradi- 
tions, of royal blood, closely related to the throne. When 
he entered upon active life, the king in Jerusalem was Uz- 



132 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

ziah, — a prince who had raised his little kingdom to an im- 
portance that it had not known since the days of David. In 
the midst of his successful career Uzziah was smitten with 
leprosy and had to retire to the lazar house. He was suc- 
ceeded by Jotham, his son, who, during his reign of sixteen 
years, continued the tradition and, in a measure, the successes 
of his father. 

Then followed the wicked reign of Ahaz and the weak 
reign of Hezekiah. During all this time the most important 
personage in Jerusalem was Isaiah, — a prophet who, by his 
genius, wrought a lasting revolution in religious thought, 
giving to God a new character and a new mission. 

The times were perilous. The two civilizations of the 
Nile and the Euphrates were struggling for the mastery. 
The little Kingdom of Judah lay between these contending 
powers; its existence was at the mercy of Babylon and Egypt; 
its politicians were trying to play off each of these powers 
against the other. There was an Egyptian and a Babylonian 
party in the city of Jerusalem. The city itself was the prey 
of wicked and weak kings, of idle and licentious princes, of 
corrupt judges and of grafting politicians. With the storm- 
cloud of Babylonian invasion darkening the East, the women 
of the city were walking the streets adorned with rings and 
anklets, with bosoms exposed and mincing as they walked. 
Society was in process of dissolution ; from the crown of the 
head to the sole of the foot there was no soundness in it. 
Upon this scene of disgrace and danger Isaiah entered, and 
so wrought in it that out of that chaos emerged a new order 
for mankind. 

Isaiah was a religious genius. Jehovah the God of Israel 
was to him the great reality; the people of Judah were the 
people of Jehovah, and the city of Jerusalem the city of 
Jehovah. But the Jehovah of Isaiah was not the old War 
God of the Bene-Israel. He was not primarily the Tent 
God of Moses or the City God of David. Isaiah saw in 
Jehovah the God of the Social Order. He gave him a new 
name, a name which, however perverted, has ever since been 
the name of the God whom the Western world has professed 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 133 

to worship. This new name in the Hebrew is Zadek, — Je- 
hovah Zadek, which in English is Jehovah The Righteous. 
Isaiah ascribed all the evils in Jerusalem to the forsaking 
on the part of the people of the worship of Jehovah-Zadek. 

It is almost impossible to give to the modern legalized mind 
any conception of what Isaiah meant by Zadek. We trans- 
late it Righteousness, and we confound righteousness with 
legality. We say what is lawful is right, whereas the very 
opposite is true. Ever since laws have been made it can be 
asserted as a general principle that what is lawful is wrong. 
Throughout the greater period of human history in the West- 
ern world human slavery has been lawful, but never for one 
single moment has human slavery been right. In England 
to-day, — in all Europe and in America, — land monopoly is 
lawful, but never for one moment has land monopoly been 
right. As I write these words the Mexican peons are waging 
what, I trust, is successful warfare, against the damnable 
wrong of land monopoly. Ever since the evolution of the 
Aryan family the law has denied to woman personal and 
political rights, and this denial is a wrong against which 
the women are rightly rebelling. All through history the 
weaker elements of society have been exploited by the 
stronger and the greatest means of exploitation has always 
been the law. It is hardly too much to say that the most 
powerful agents of unrighteousness have been the courts of 
law. Such courts condemned Jesus to death and sent Dred 
Scott back into slavery. 

Jehovah The Righteous condemns legality in the name of 
righteousness. He is the God of the Working Class, the God 
of the Slave, the God of the Poor, the God of the Widow, the 
God of the Fatherless. 

Isaiah, the prophet of Jehovah The Righteous, asserts that 
society exists to defend the rights of the weak against the 
aggressions of the strong, the liberties of man against the 
usurpations of property. Jehovah The Righteous condemns 
the principle upon which civilizations rest. No man has any 
right to say that aught he possesses is his own. If he be 
faithful to God he must hold all that he has in trust for 



134 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the community. Both in earning and in spending, the wel- 
fare of society is first, the welfare of the individual second. 
So long as there is an ignorant man, an overworked woman, 
a hungry child in the city, so long is Jehovah The Righteous 
angry and Jerusalem without peace. 

Isaiah made the worship of Jehovah The Righteous to 
consist in doing righteousness. He had no patience with the 
ritual of the temple, with the new moons and the sabbaths. 
All this was to him so much blasphemy of Jehovah The 
Righteous, who cries in immortal language : 

"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me. saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of 
rams and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood 
of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When ye come to 
appear before me who hath required this at your hands to 
trample my courts. Bring no more vain oblations; incense 
is an abomination unto me . . . Your new moons and your 
appointed feasts my soul hateth . . . Wash you ; make you 
clean, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the father- 
less, plead for the widow." 

Of all the gods whom men have worshipped none is greater, 
none can be greater, than Jehovah The Righteous, the God 
of Isaiah, — the God of the Social Order. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

The God of The Temple : Jehovah the Holy 

His removal to Jerusalem and his long residence in the 
temple brought about a decided change in the character and 
habits of Jehovah. He became more and more the God of 
the temple and less and less the God of the people. In the 
majestic presence in the temple we hardly recognized the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 135 

homely God, who, without ceremony or state, came and sat 
in the door of Abraham's tent. This god, in becoming a 
sovereign, has ceased to be a friend. Nor do we see in him 
anything of that ruggedness that was his habit in the wilder- 
ness, when, after a hard day's march, he slept on the ground; 
nor does he shock us with that fierceness with which he 
pursued the Canaanites until the going down of the sun. 

City life has refined the god and given him a new name. 
Men speak of him now with bated breath, not as Jehovah 
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; but as Jehovah Kodesh, Je- 
hovah the Separate, the Holy One of Israel. Under this 
name God is beginning to have an existence of his own, apart 
from the life of his people. Even though Israel perish, the 
Holy One endures. 

The Sons of Levi are the caretakers of his temple, but 
they are no longer the guardians of his person. He has 
mightier servitors to wait upon him in his new estate. "Cher- 
ubim and Seraphim veil their faces before him and cry : Holy, 
Holy, Holy ! (Kodesh, Kodesh, Kodesh !) Heaven and earth 
are full of thy glory. Glory be to Thee, Jehovah Most 
High." 

In this exaltation of Jehovah we see the effect of surround- 
ing and sophisticated civilizations upon the simplicity of Is- 
rael. In former days when Abraham met with God and God 
called him and said : 'Abraham," Abraham answered him 
and said : "Here am I." Here we have a simplicity and 
directness that is lost in the later era — God is no longer a 
shepherd meeting a shepherd; He is a mighty potentate, a 
celestial Pharaoh, or a Tiglath-pileser, sitting enthroned in 
the midst of his courtiers, unfamiliar and unapproachable. 
Isaiah does not meet Jehovah as Abraham did in the tent 
door, nor even as Elijah did in the cave of Horeb, but in 
the sacred temple, with the lights burning before the altar, 
in the hush of the priests murmuring their inaudible prayers. 
In that darkness Isaiah sees the throne of Jehovah high and 
lifted up, in that silence he hears the seraphic anthem and 
the call of his God. 

This notion of holiness is not peculiar to the religion of 



136 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Israel. It is an element natural to all religion. It has its 
origin in a fear that men have of the unknown and the dan- 
gerous. It is only an elaboration and refinement of the prin- 
ciple of taboo, or negative magic, by which primitive man 
sought to protect kings and gods from profanation, and to 
hedge himself away from a too great nearness to royalty and 
divinity, which was dangerous to his peace and safety. Those 
men are safest upon whom gods and kings do not look. If 
kings and gods could come and go among the people as beasts 
and hinds do, without restriction or ceremony, then that 
familiarity that breeds contempt would lead the people to 
despise the god or king who made himself so common. To 
avert this danger, men set apart places as sacred to their 
gods ; kings surrounded themselves with ceremony, wore 
robes of state, and moved in an atmosphere of etiquette. 
Neither a king nor a god can safely engage in any of the 
common tasks of life : a king may not cut wood nor draw 
water; a god must not be a carpenter nor a bricklayer. 

Holiness did not, in the primitive religions, necessarily 
include what we call purity. The temple prostitutes, both 
male and female, are called in Hebrew Kodesh and Kodesha. 
It is true that from the beginning the use of the temple for 
impure rites was an abomination to the Hebrew. This was 
owing to the fact that Jehovah was aloof from all that per- 
tained to sex, and because of this aloofness, the Hebrew con- 
ception of holiness came to include chastity as an essential 
quality. In Christianity this quality was supreme, so that 
a holy man or holy woman was a man or woman who had 
made and kept a vow of perpetual chastity. But in itself 
holiness is simply separation, — dedication to a special use. 
Priests are holy not in and of themselves, but by reason of 
their consecration. Places are holy not because they are 
different from other places, but because they have been set 
apart by the thoughts of men to special uses. 

The worship of The Holy One of Israel has divided the 
life of men into the sacred and the common. One day in 
seven is sacred, the other six are the common days of the 
week. On the common days you may sing or dance, on 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 137 

sacred days you must go softly and walk in the bitterness 
of your soul. The men who do the common work of life, 
who plow and sow and reap and build, who marry and are 
given in marriage, are common men. The men who wait 
upon God, who stand before his altar and break his bread 
are holy men, reverend men, right reverend men, and most 
reverend men. 

This division of human life into the sacred and profane, 
while it has been useful in a way, has, on the whole, been 
detrimental to the proper development both of the gods and 
of men. A holy god is a god apart ; the sphere of his influ- 
ence is circumscribed ; he cannot go down into the market, 
lest his holiness be contaminated with the vulgarity of trade ; 
he cannot mix in politics without loss to his reputation. A 
holy god may not marry nor be given in marriage, for that 
is to be in the place of the breaking forth children; he may 
not indulge in scientific pursuits, lest he become involved in 
the impurities of nature. Under the restrictions placed upon 
him by his holiness, a god can only assume the role of a 
preacher who preaches an abstract righteousness of which the 
world is not worthy, and which the world, in consequence, 
lets severely alone. Such a god may be an object of worship, 
— a narcotic for spiritual insomnia ; he may inhabit beautiful 
churches and marvelous temples, but his seclusion has cost 
him his liberty. He can no longer make the clouds his 
chariots, nor fly on the wings of the winds. He can no 
longer walk in the garden in the cool of the day nor consort 
with the camel-drivers of the desert. I myself have been a 
reverend man, and I know how irksome it is. It narrows 
outlook, curtails opportunity, and impoverishes life. 

But if the gods and priests of the gods suffer from this 
specialization, upon the common man is entailed a greater 
loss, a more far-reaching disaster. As the god tends to be- 
come imprisoned in his holiness, so the man is apt to be en- 
meshed in his commonness. Since he cannot walk day by 
day with gods and heroes, he is content to walk with fools 
and knaves. Since goddesses cannot visit him, he satisfies 
himself with silly women. Business and politics are corrupt 



138 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

because the fear of the gods is not in them. Jehovah-Kodesh 
sometimes sadly interferes with the work of Jehovah-Zadek. A 
man connot do much work in the world who is afraid of 
defilement. "Every battle of the warrior is with confused 
noise and garments rolled in blood." A battle-field is not 
a savory place. A man or a woman may sometimes have to 
risk virtue as well as life in the struggle for betterment. 

But while holiness has thus been detrimental to a rounder 
development of the conception of God in his relation to him- 
self and to man, yet to lose that idea altogether would be 
disastrous. Jehovah-Zadek is a definition of religion in terms 
of social righteousness ; Jehovah-Kodesh is a definition of reli- 
gion in terms of personal integrity. A god must be in the 
world, but not of it; in politics, but not a politician; in busi- 
ness, but not a business man. 

Personality must always be above and greater than en- 
vironment. A man of the world is always less than a man : 
the world rules him when he should rule the world. It is 
this fear of merging personality into environment that drives 
men into the wilderness and makes of them anchorites. Even 
a god can only escape from this danger of submergence by 
withdrawing himself from phenomena. To think of him as 
god we must think of him as abstract. It is well both for 
gods and men to go apart from time to time into a secret 
place and rest awhile. But the great god and the great man 
is the one who can at the same time be Jehovah The Right- 
eous and Jehovah The Holy, who can be busy in the world 
and silent in soul. 

John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking; Jesus 
came eating and drinking, — so much so that men called him 
a "gluttonous man and a winebibber ; a friend of publicans and 
sinners." Men since then have seen in John a prophet; but 
in Jesus they have seen a God. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 139 

CHAPTER XXVIII 
The God of The Book 

In the Sixth Century before our era the religion of Jehovah 
suffered a change revolutionary in its character and far-reach- 
ing in its effect on the religious life of the Western world. 
Toward the end of that century Jerusalem, the City of Je- 
hovah, after a long and cruel siege, was taken by Nebuazar- 
Adan, General of the King of Babylon ; the temple of Jehovah 
was defiled, the walls of the city were broken down, its gates 
burned with fire, and its people carried captive to Babylon. 

According to all precedent, this debacle should have been 
the end of the career of Jehovah as a god. Unable to protect 
his city against the violence of the stranger; compelled, in 
his impotence, to see his temple profaned and his altar dese- 
crated ; powerless to save, this god had to stand by and see 
his young men slain at the head of the streets and the virgin 
daughters of Zion violated within the courts of the sanctuary. 
The fall of Jerusalem was the apparent defeat and disgrace 
of the God of Jerusalem; the ruined city was evidence to all 
who passed by of a ruined god. 

That the religion of Jehovah should have survived this 
disaster, and out of this calamity should have devised the 
means whereby that religion became not only the religion of 
the Jew but the religion of the Western world, is a marvel 
of history so striking that one cannot wonder that this marvel 
has been ascribed to the direct action of Jehovah himself. 
Because he was able to do this thing he has lifted himself 
far above all the city gods of the ancient world, and to-day 
instead of being, like the ruck of city gods, known only to 
scholars as the obscure deity of a little hill town of Syria, 
he is hailed and worshipped as the God of the Whole Earth. 
How did he do it? 

The means were as simple as the effect was wonderful. 
He transformed his character from that of the God of the 
City into the form of a God of the Book. 



140 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Of all the achievements of humanity next in importance 
after the evolution of speech, is the invention of writing. 
Beginning with small pictures cut in stone, and on the bones 
that lay in his cave, man began to make an outward record 
of the thoughts of his mind. The lion that he had seen with 
his eye he reproduced with his hand. This, which at first 
was an amusement of his idleness, he soon found to be useful. 
It was an assistance to his memory. The beast that he 
killed yesterday he could picture to-day and look on to- 
morrow. And not only could he keep before his own eye 
the image of what that eye Jiad seen, but he could also show 
it to others, — by means of this picture-writing he could con- 
vey the thought of his mind to the mind of another. That 
other might be far away out of the reach of the sound of his 
voice ; yet by means of his picture the picture-maker could 
send his message to the mind of his friend or his enemy ; 
he could send his thoughts of peace in the form of a dove, 
and his feeling of hatred in the guise of a serpent. As a 
consequence of this effort on the part of man to record and 
convey his impressions, we have the picture-writing of Egypt, 
and, as an improvement on this, the phonetic alphabet, — a 
marvel so great that it has ceased to be marvelous. 

The phonetic alphabet, as the name implies, was an inven- 
tion of the Phoenicians as a sort of shorthand picture-writing 
to be used in commercial transactions. It is based upon the 
principle that while the human voice is capable of only a 
limited number of elementary sounds, yet, by the combina- 
tion of these elements, an unlimited number of words can be 
and are produced. So we have letters, representing these 
elementary sounds, and by combining the letters we have 
words that transform sound into sight, and so have a written 
as well as a spoken language. This invention enabled a 
man to reveal and express his thought with a fullness and 
accuracy impossible in picture-writing; and from that time 
to this man has not only been a builder of cities but also 
a writer of books. 

It was this contrivance that Jehovah made use of, after 
his city was destroyed, to keep his hold on the worship of 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 141 

his people and his name alive in the earth. Just before and 
during the captivity in Babylon the legends of the god and 
the people of Israel were reduced to writing by men whose 
gift for story-telling has been unrivalled in the history of 
narration. During that period great thinkers, such as Isaiah 
the elder, Micah, and Jeremiah, had spoken in the name of 
the Lord, and their words had been written upon tablets by 
the scribes, and so preserved for future generations. Sing- 
ers had sung psalms in the temple of Jehovah, on the hills 
of Judah, beside the river of Babylon and in the streets of 
the city of their captivity, and these hyms had been gathered 
into the song-book of Jehovah. 

On the Sabbath Day the captive children of Jehovah gath- 
ered in a common meeting-place, and these books were read 
in their ears by ministers appointed for the purpose. The 
books were sacred and the hearing and the reading an act 
of worship. We of to-day can have no conception of the 
effect of this reading upon the minds of the hearers. In 
those days books were not printed, they were written ; they 
were not published, they were read. Every book was divine ; 
every word inspired. 

The effect of this innovation upon the religious life of 
the people was revolutionary. It changed radically the mode 
of man's approach to God. The old form of worship by 
means of animal sacrifice gave place to the hearing of the 
word. When we think of primitive religious worship, Jewish 
and Gentile, and remember that every temple was a slaughter- 
house ; that the priests of the Greek gods were called butch- 
ers ; that when one came near a house of worship, one heard 
the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep, and within 
the house one was sickened by the smell of fresh blood and 
burning flesh, it is easily seen how great was the change from 
such a worship as this to a worship which consisted of read- 
ing and hearing a book. 

It is not to be inferred that those who were at the first 
engaged in this mode of divine worship were conscious of 
the revolution that they were effecting. Far from it. Their 
songs are songs of bitter regret that they cannot sacrifice 



142 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

their offerings of blood on the altar of their God in Jerusalem. 
Their city and their City God were still the object of their 
passionate devotion. They hardly thought of their new form 
of worship as worship, but only as a reminder of a worship 
they had lost. So soon as they could, a remnant of this 
people returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and restored 
the sacrifices. But the greater number remained in Babylon 
and were men of the synagogue and not men of the temple, 
and in the synagogue the center of worship was not the 
altar, — there was no altar there, — but the reading desk. 

From the time of the Babylonish captivity begins the dis- 
persion of the Jew. The Jews ceased to be an agricultural 
people, they became merchants and money lenders. Then, 
as now, they congregated in cities, resisting assimilation, 
maintaining their tribal organizations, meeting in their syna- 
gogues to hear the word of their God. Jehovah was their 
God and Jerusalem his city, — then and there only could the 
sacrifices be offered on his altar. The self-exiled Jew in 
Alexandria and Rome could go to Jerusalem only now and 
then ; some never visited the sacred shrine, and since he could 
not offer a calf of a year old, he had to offer the calves of 
his lips ; as he could not eat of the meat of the sacrifice, he 
had to feed on the word of his God. So it came to be a 
saying: "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every 
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God doth man 
live." 

So the change came about. 

In all the cities where the Jews sojourned the stranger 
entering their place of worship was astonished to find that 
place without an image and without an altar, — only a man 
standing up to read, only a people sitting to listen. Little 
by little the ancient Hebrew language was forgotten and in 
its place came the Greek or the Arabic, so that the stranger 
was able to hear in his own tongue the marvelous words of 
God ; and they who came once came again ; and thus the 
word of the Lord was preached in every city and the revolu- 
tion in religious worship became not local but universal. 

The Jews divided their sacred writings into three classes : 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 143 

the Torah or the Law ; the Prophets, and the Sacred Writ- 
ings. In the Torah or the Books of the Law were found 
the rules by which the Jew disciplined his life; in the Prophets 
was written the history of his people, and in the Psalms their 
aspirations. So that in this collection of books the Jew had 
a method of discipline, a philosophy of history, and a means 
of culture. And so superior to all others in existence at the 
time were these essentials of human development that the 
Jew forced their use, for these purposes, upon the Western 
world. The books of the Hebrews became in due time the 
rule of discipline, the philosophy of history, the means of 
culture to the Mediterranean world and to all the people who 
have derived their civilization from the Mediterranean basin. 
Europe and America, even to this day, profess the religion 
of Jehovah, the God of the Book. 

In this Book God is set forth as the judge, the ruler, and 
the teacher of men. God as judge is both the maker and 
the interpreter of the law. As it is written, there is One 
lawgiver. These laws are statutes and ordinances, com- 
mandments and decrees issued by Jehovah for the govern- 
ment of the people. They are not merely principles of gov- 
ernment, they are specific acts of legislation, regulating the 
most minute affairs of life down even to the way of washing 
pots and kettles. 

As we are told by high Jewish authority : 

"The Torah contains rules and regulations which should 
govern the life of man and lead him to moral and religious 
perfection. Every rule is expressive of a fundamental, eth- 
ical, or religious idea. Those regulations in which human 
intelligence is unable to discern the fundamental idea are, 
through belief in their divine origin, vouchsafed the same 
high religious importance ; and the ethical value of submis- 
sion to the will of God where its purpose is not understood 
is even greater. In observing the Law man's good intention 
is the main point." 1 

Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. xii, p. 133. 



144 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The will of Jehovah is the basis of morals. What Jehovah 
wills is right because he wills it. Jehovah has spoken ; man 
must obey. This divine basis of morals is of the essence 
of the religion of Jehovah, — The God of the Book. Its effect 
for good and for ill upon the religious life of mankind will 
be seen as we watch the progression of this god from a local 
to a wider dominion. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

The God of Inspiration 

It is greatly to the advantage of the religion of Jehovah 
in its competition with the other religions of the world that 
its god is the God of the Working Class. This fact has 
given to its literature a cultural power far surpassing that 
of any other literature known to history. The holy books 
of the Jewish people are the vade mecum of a civilization. 
Their study is not the occupation of the scholar, it is the em- 
ployment of the artisans, "the mean workman," as Bishop 
Andrews calls him, and of the poor. This literature is not 
only explained by professors to classes, it is expounded by 
preachers to congregations. It is the handbook of worship 
and the guide of life to the multitude. Its words are read 
at the consecration of the new-born child, at the marriage 
of the bride to the bridegroom, and at the burial of the dead. 

The place this literature has held in the Western world is 
no mere accident; it is popular because it is the literature of 
the people, — written by the people for the people. 

The literature of Greece, — the only literature that can com- 
pare in cultural power with the literature of the Hebrew, — is 
the literature of the leisure class, written by the leisure class, 
for the leisure class. The Homeric poems alone, of all the 
writings of the Greeks, make any appeal to the common man ; 
and even Homer is the poet of heroes and not the poet of 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 145 

common men. The interest of the ordinar)' man in the "Iliad" 
is the glimpse it gives him into the life and doings of gods 
and divine men. He reads of all this with the same avidity 
that the chambermaid reads of the duchess;, it stirs his 
imagination, it does not move his heart. As for the great 
tragedies of. the Greek poets, they, even more than the 
tragedies of Shakespeare, are caviar to the public; they, 
too, have primarily to do with gods and princes, with prob- 
lems of fate as exhibited in the lives of the great. 

The philosophers of Greece, who correspond in a way 
to the prophets of Israel, addressed themselves consciously 
to the leisure, cultured class. For the workingman, whether 
a slave or a free artisan, these philosophers had a profound 
contempt. The mass of the people, who did the world's work, 
were no more to the philosopher than were the beasts of the 
stall. Aristotle argues the necessity of slavery from the fact 
that without slavery there can be no philosophy. The slave 
must work that the philosopher may think. All education, 
in the Grecian world, is the product of a leisure secured to 
the leisure class by the unrequited toil of the workers. Our 
word '"school" is derived from the Greek word jxoXtq, which 
means "play" or "leisure." As a consequence of their com- 
plete alienation from the working class, the Greek philos- 
ophers have never made the slightest appeal to that class. 
The Greek religion perished because the Greek thinkers could 
not interpret that religion in the terms of the common life. 
They were busy spinning out of their brains their theories of 
the universe, never once asking what the people might be 
thinking on these same problems. Thus, while the indirect 
influence of Greek thought upon the intellectual life of the 
Western world has been very great, its influence on the moral 
and spiritual life has been almost nil. 

Even when the Greek writers do deal with the common 
life of the common people, it is always from the leisure-class 
point of view. In the pastorals of Theocritus, in the "Ec- 
logues" and "Georgics" of Vergil, we have that picture of 
pastoral life that has become classic. It is the picture so 
popular on Dresden china of the shepherd piping, not to his 



146 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

sheep but to his love. In this conception of shepherd life 
the sheep are nothing but the background of the shepherd's 
love-making. He drives them to pasture, not that they may 
feed, but that he may sigh. Classical poetry knows nothing 
of the life of the shepherd as shepherd. It is a song about a 
shepherd, not a song of a shepherd. And this, in a measure, is 
the fatal defect of classical literature in general ; it is not vital 
to human experience. 

How different is the pastoral poetry of Hebrew literature 
from that of the classic! Here we have a song not about 
the shepherd, but a song of the shepherd. We learn to our 
surprise that the shepherd is not at all occupied with thoughts 
of love, as the classic world supposed, he has a love but it 
is not for a woman, however fair; it is for the sheep. It is 
to the sheep he pipes, to call them in and to call them out; 
he leads the sheep into the green pasture, that they may feed; 
and beside the still waters, that they may drink; when they 
pass through the valley of the shadow of death his rod and 
his staff are there to comfort them. David was a shepherd, 
and as a shepherd sang of the shepherd's life. Because of 
this, the shepherd song of David (if it be his song, and whether 
his or another's, it is the song of a shepherd) is in the heart 
and on the lips of millions, while the pastorals of Theocritus 
and Virgil are not known outside of a little circle which finds 
amusement in their trilling. 

And this vitality is characteristic of the whole of Hebrew 
literature when that literature was in its golden age. Isaiah 
and Jeremiah differ essentially from Sophocles and Euripedes. 
The Greek poet celebrated the misfortune of a king; the 
Hebrew poet the calamities of the people. The Greek poet 
sang a song about suffering; the Hebrew a song of suffering. 
The threnody of Jeremiah over the desolation of Jerusalem 
is not the conscious expression of an imagined emotion ; it 
is the unconscious cry of a broken heart. 

The literature of the Hebrew is the literature of pathos, 
because the Hebrews are a pathetic people. And that liter- 
ature makes its appeal, because of its pathos, to the universal 
heart of man ; for man's life is pathetic even to tears. It is 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 147 

as Father Hall says in the story of John Inglesant: "Only 
the infinite pity is commensurate to the infinite pathos of 
human life." 

"The voice said cry, and I said, what shall I cry? All flesh 
is grass and all the goodliness thereof as the flower of the 
field, the grass withereth and the flower fadeth. In the 
morning it is green and groweth up, in the evening it is cut 
down, dried up and withered. The days of our age are three- 
score years and ten and though a man be so strong that he 
come to fourscore years, yet is their strength but labor and 
sorrow, so soon passeth it away and we are gone. ... In 
Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and great weep- 
ing, Rachel weeping for her children and refused to be com- 
forted because they are not. . . . Ye will bring down my 
grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. . . . As a sheep before her 
shearers is dumb so he openeth not his mouth ; the walls of 
Jerusalem are broken down and her gates burned with fire. 
... I have trodden the wine press alone and of the people 
there is none with me." 

All the pathos of life is summed up in such sayings as 
these ; the death of children and the weakness of age ; the 
shortness of life and the futility of life ; unrequited toil and 
innocence condemned ; exile from home and home defiled ; 
the ingratitude of children and the indifference of a people ; 
a city corrupt and, because corrupt, a city desolate ; the lone- 
liness of the great and the greatness of loneliness ; words that 
break the heart and hearts that break the word. All of 
this pathos of life comes from the lips of this pathetic people 
doomed from the first to a life of hardship and of suffering; 
wandering shepherds in a desert where there was no water; 
strangers in a land that was not theirs ; the children of bond- 
age condemned to build the tombs of the Pharaohs ; lovers 
of a land that they could not possess ; carried captive to Bab- 
ylon ; kneeling three times a day with their faces toward Jer- 
usalem ; praying to a god silent and distant, — a god who 
seems to have put them in the wine vat that he might trample 
them in his anger until his feet are purple with their blood. 



148 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

And what shall we say more? Is not this a people who 
have been robbed of their birthright ; whose Holy Books have 
been stolen from them and turned against them ; are they 
not the children of the Ghetto who have been hunted like 
dogs from their kennels; people of the yellow gaberdine who 
are spit upon and take it patiently because sufferance is the 
badge of all their tribe? Is not this people a people apart 
in their sufferings, that through them a suffering humanity 
might give adequate expressions to the emotions of its broken 
heart? 

But hark! how through all this threnody there sounds 
the note of defiant hope. Israel, in spite of its shame and 
suffering, still is and ever will be the people of God. And 
God, for His name's sake, must care for the people. He can- 
not let the people perish, lest His name be a reproach to the 
heathen. Israel's sufferings are God's opportunities. They 
do not suffer alone, — God suffers with them. In all their 
affliction He is afflicted, and the Angel of His Presence saves 
them. Who is this that comcth from Edom with dyed gar- 
ments from Bozrah? He that is mighty to save. Israel 
is marked as God's people, not in spite of his sufferings but 
because of his sufferings. "He is despised and rejected of 
men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. My 
servant is more marred than any man and his visage than 
the sons of men. Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by, 
was there ever sorrow like unto my sorrow? Surely the 
Lord hath afflicted Him and put Him to grief." 

But after defeat is victory; after shame, honor; after slav- 
ery, deliverance; after death, life. "A way shall there be 
and a highway, and the redeemed of the Lord shall come 
to Zion with songs on their lips. He shall restore the waste 
places. He shall build up the tabernacle of David that is 
broken down. He who now goeth on his way weeping, 
bearing good seed, shall doubtless come again with joy and 
bring his sheaves with him. The Lord even the most mighty 
God hath spoken and called the world from the rising of the 
sun even to the going down of the same." 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 149 

The literature of Israel has taken captive the common peo- 
ple, because it is expressive of the life of the common people. 
It voices the experience, the thoughts, and feelings of the 
working class. It speaks of the life of those who go forth 
to their work and to their labor until the evening, who bear 
the burden and heat of the day, who suffer the injustice of 
unrequited toil, who endure the ignominy of obscurity, who 
work without reward and die without fame, who sow that 
others may reap, and die that others may live. They are 
the rank and file of the soldiery of whom Napoleon said : 
"What are a hundred thousand men to me?" — the rank and 
file of the industrial army of whom one dies for every floor 
that is laid in a modern building; slaves of the mine, who are 
suffocated by gas and burned by fire damp ; stokers in boiler 
rooms, famishing in the heat while the passengers are dancing 
on the deck; women bearing ten children and burying eight. 
This is humanity enslaved and exiled, who, with Paul and 
Silas in their prison, sing of Christ the Lord arisen. These 
are prisoners of hope, always despised and never ashamed ; 
always defeated, but never destroyed ; children of the slum 
living apart, children of the shoddy clothing spit upon by 
those whom they serve, — ever patient, even hopeful, working 
day by day for a bit of bread, and by their surplus product 
making possible science and art and government and law and 
religion. It is because of this that, while the dialogues of 
Plato and the tragedies of Sophocles and the songs of Pindar 
are the delight of the scholar, the Psalms of David and the 
Prophecies of Isaiah, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the 
story of Ruth, are the consolation of the Cotter's Saturday 
Night. Jehovah has triumphed over the other gods, most 
of all because he is the God of Inspiration. He is the Holy 
Air, the breathing of which is the common right and the 
source of the common life. 



150 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XXX 
Jehovah: Creator of Heaven and Earth 

If we accept Burke's definition of the sublime, we shall 
not find in human writing greater sublimity than is revealed 
to us in the opening chapter of the Hebrew Scriptures. In 
that chapter and to the end of the third verse of the second 
chapter we have a Hymn of Creation that, in grandeur of 
conception and in beauty and simplicity of language, ranks 
among the highest achievements of human genius. Thought 
and language can hardly go beyond the work of this Hebrew 
poet. As a thinker he anticipated later philosophy and fore- 
shadowed modern science. 

In the opening words of this hymn all mysteries are sug- 
gested, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal 
meet and mingle. In order to grasp the meaning of this 
writer in its fulness one must read him in his own tongue, 
no translation does him justice. Our English rendering fails 
to convey accurately the meaning of the Hebrew words. We 
read : "In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth/' but we do not have in mind the god nor the creation 
that was in the mind of this poet. 

Brought up, as we have been, under another theological 
influence, our God is a God apart from the universe, and crea- 
tion is the making of something out of nothing. Neither 
of these thoughts was in the mind of this author. In his 
day that dread abstraction whom we call God, sitting in his 
lonely heaven, was not yet conceived by the thought of man. 
The mind of man was hovering in those days between pol- 
ytheism and pantheism, between the worship of the forces 
of nature as many, and the worship of the force of nature as 
one. The poet's writing is evidence of that transition : the 
gods are plural, their act is singular. 

The act of creation celebrated in this poem is not the mak- 
ing out of nothing, it is rearrangement of already existing 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 151 

material. The word God is in the plural, Elohim, and means 
literally "the strong ones" ; the word Bara translated "creat- 
ed," means "to arrange," "to shape." So we may render the 
verse in this wise : 

In our beginning the strong ones arranged trie heavens and the 
earth. Before that the earth was a wilderness and a desolation; and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep. 

And from this point the writer goes on to describe pro- 
gressive rearrangements, or creations, passing successively 
from lower to higher forms of life. 

This ancient poet gives us in vivid language the most ab- 
stract thought that the human mind can entertain. Spinoza 
expresses this thought by the words : natura naturans, — nature 
naturing, — eternal energy energizing in time and space. All 
that we are, all that we see and hear, all that we feel and 
think are nothing else than this natura naturans, — this eternal 
energy energizing in time and space ; and time and space are 
nothing else than his eternal energizing. Reduced to its low- 
est philosophical denominator, this is pure pantheism ; it is 
to say : "God is the world and the world is God." 

Out of this conception a philosophy may be formed, but 
not a religion. The pure reason may comprehend, but the 
common mind cannot take in anything so abstract. All our 
mythologies and all our religions have been unconscious efforts 
on the part of the mind to resolve this abstraction into con- 
crete forms, to cut out from this abstraction gods nearer the 
heart and life of man. 

In the chapter in our Bible immediately following this 
Hymn of Creation we have an effort, — and that most success- 
ful, — to reduce this Infinite to finite proportions. Jean As- 
true, a French physician (1684-1766) was the first biblical 
student to call attention to the fact that there are in the book 
of Genesis two accounts of creation, differing essentially one 
from the other. Scholars tell us that the second account of 
creation is the earlier in time, and that the Hymn of Creation 
is an interpretation by a later writer of the primitive account. 






152 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Beginning with the fourth verse of Chapter II, we have this 
second account opening with the words : 

These are the generations of the heaven and the earth in the day 
of their making by Jehovah Elohim of the heavens and the earth. 

The difference between this and that other conception of 
creation at first is very slight, but it is a difference that is 
divergence leading into new regions of thought and feeling. 
First, and most important, the tribal god of the Hebrews 
has become identified with the Creator of the universe, no 
change that I can recall, in human thinking, can in practical 
importance, be compared with this identification of Elohim 
with Jehovah by this unknown Hebrew thinker. It lifted 
the War God of Israel to the throne of the universe. 

The word, translated "create," is no longer the concrete 
word Bara, "to cut," "to fashion," it is the more abstract 
word Asoth, "to do." In this conception the manifold uni- 
verse of sun and moon and star, of land and water, of creep- 
ing thing, of bird and beast and man, is the handiwork of a 
personal Being who is none other than Jehovah, the God of 
Israel ; and because he made all these things they are his 
to do with as he wills. 

Not only in this second account of creation has the Creator 
become identified with Jehovah, but the purpose of creation 
is clearly defined. There is not, as in the Hymn of Creation, 
a development from lower to higher forms of life ; here the 
highest comes first, creation does not end it begins with man. 

Before man no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb 
of the field had yet sprung up, for Jehovah Elohim had not caused it to 
rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 

Having made man, Jehovah then made of his rib a woman 
and planted a garden eastward in Eden and placed the man in 
the garden. After this Jehovah made the fishes of the sea, 
the fowls of the air, the creeping things, the beasts, and the 
cattle. In other words, in this second account the world is 
made for man and not man for the world, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 153 

Strange as it may seem, this conception of creation, — which 
when we analyze it, seems not only childish but grotesque, — 
has held in thrall the minds of the Western world for nearly 
two thousand years. For centuries it was not so much as 
questioned, and to-day it is held in millions of minds as the 
sufficient explanation of the existence of man and of the 
world. 

The reason for this astounding phenomenon is that we have 
in this conception a definite answer to a pressing question. 
Men are as children asking questions, and they will not, — 
indeed they cannot, — rest until their question is answered. 
It makes no difference what the answer is, so only it is an 
answer. Therefore, one of the reasons for the spreading of 
Judaism in the world was this definite reply to the cry of 
man's heart for some explanation of his origin and destiny. 
Of these things the Aryan religion could tell him nothing. 
Zeus was not the creator of the world nor the maker of man. 
The gods were as men, subject to fate, — they came and they 
went, they rose and they fell, and men saw in them nothing 
but a repetition on a larger field of the changes of this mortal 
life. It was this void in the understanding that was filled 
b) r the declaration that Jehovah made man for his own pur- 
poses. The Hebrew prophets gave to Jehovah a character 
that appealed to the heart and the conscience of man, made 
God a friend and a Saviour as well as a Creator, and so gave 
to this conception a dominion that still endures in defiance 
of reason and knowledge. 

This answer is, moreover, of all answers most congenial to 
the nature of man. It placed this world in the center of 
the universe, the sun and moon and the stars moving over 
it to give light by day and by night ; it made of man the 
beginning and the end of the life process ; it made of the 
Jew and of the Christian (taken over from the Jew) the cen- 
tral figure of history. We have in this conception of creation 
the tribal consciousness of the Jew, making out of that con- 
sciousness a world in which a Jew can live. 

The Jew traces his descent in the main life from Adam 
to Abraham and from Abraham through Israel to himself. 



154 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

In all the manifold movements of the world he sees the Prov- 
idence of Jehovah, working for his preservation, purification 
and exaltation. The Jew made of his tribal consciousness 
his religion ; out of it he fashioned his God, with the help of 
his God he placed himself in the center of history, and he 
has stayed there. His God has become the God and his re- 
ligious history the religious history of the Western world. 
And all because he has been definite in his statements as to 
God and himself. 

And it is this, as it appears to me, conception of crea- 
tion, — to the exclusion of the more sublime idea of the Hymn 
of Creation, — that has been cherished by the religious thought 
of the Western world. It inspired the genius of Dante and 
Milton, it called forth the profound reasoning of Aquinas 
and Scotus, it has been the basis of theology from Paul to 
Newman. To keep this world in its place, human thinking 
has been condemned as evil and thousands of the best and 
bravest have been exiled, imprisoned, beaten with rods, and 
burned at the stake. 

And the reason for all this is that this conception has been 
a protection for man in the presence of the infinites and 
eternities that frighten his soul. 



Book V 
THE DEGRADATION OF THE GODS 



CHAPTER XXXI 
The Degradation of The Gods 

From the battle of Chceronea, in the year 338 B. C, to the 
battle of Pharsalus, in the year 48 B. C, the world of which 
the Mediterranean Sea is the center was in process of cen- 
tralization. The battle of Chceronea put an end to the De- 
mocracy of Greece, the battle of Pharsalus finally extinguished 
the liberties of the Republic of Rome. 

Alexander of Macedon, the son of Philip, following up 
the victories of his father, destroyed the autonomy of the city 
states of Greece, — subjecting Athens, Thebes, and Sparta to 
the dominion of Macedon, — and then, with Greece as his 
background, taking in Egypt by the way, entered upon his 
marvelous career of conquest in Asia, making of Western 
Asia as far as the Indus an appanage of Europe. 

The successors of Alexander, — the Seleucide in Antioch, 
and the Ptolemies in Alexandria, — made the Greek language, 
thought, and custom native to Syria and Egypt. Alexandria 
rivaled Athens as a seat of learning, and Antioch was, for a 
time, the commercial capitol of the Grecian world. All the 
lands of Western Asia and Northeastern Africa became, as 
Wales is to-day, bilingual. Greek was the language of the 
court and the school, the native tongue was used in domestic 
intercourse and in rustic places. The unifying influence of 
Greek culture became more potent after the Roman conquest 
had incorporated the Grecian world into the political fabric 
of the Empire. Politically impotent, in pure intellect the 
Greeks were so much the superior of the Romans that, without 
intention or effort, they brought the Roman mind into sub- 
jection to Greek culture. 

157 



158 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

After the Roman conquest the whole Mediterranean world 
was bilingual. Greek was the language of letters, Latin the 
language of law. Every one who was at all in the world 
had to know and use these two forms of speech. The Greeks 
were everywhere lecturing and teaching, the Romans were 
everywhere ruling and judging ; so that a man had to talk 
with the Greeks and plead with the Romans, — if he expected 
to know anything, or do anything, or be anybody. Greek 
thought overarched the Mediterranean world as does the sky; 
Roman law lay under it as does the earth. 

When Caesar, on the field of Pharsalus, put an end to the 
misrule of the Roman oligarchy he carried the principle of 
centralization to a point beyond which it could not go. Caesar 
was the center and Caesar was the circumference of the 
Roman world. 

When Caesar died he left to his grand-nephew Octavianus 
Caesar, a boy of nineteen, the inheritance of the world. This 
youth, the most consummate politician history has ever 
known, completed the centralizing work of his great uncle, 
and, after a reign of more than half a century, left the Roman 
world so crystallized that it was able to withstand the as- 
saults of time for five centuries. 

During this period of centralization the creative energies 
of the human soul, being exhausted, ceased to operate, and 
a period of crystallization set in, not only in politics but in 
every department of life. The great men of the Roman world 
were not poets nor philosophers, they were lawyers, and law- 
yers never create, they only codify. The Roman people had 
;he gift of organization beyond all the people of the earth. 
They could not originate, but they could arrange, and by 
the perfection of their arrangement they could stifle all fur- 
ther origination. The Roman must have everything where 
he can put his hands on it and make use of it. There must 
be no blurred outlines to his thought ; no mysteries beyond 
his reach. The Roman language has the simplicity, the def- 
initeness, of the Roman people. 

The Romans, having possessed the world, proceeded to 
organize it; and to that end evolved the Roman law, which 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 159 

remains to this day the basic law of the Western world. 
The source of law is the Caesar, the purpose of law the 
maintenance of the peace and prosperity of the Empire. This 
made the government of the world definite : If you are in 
doubt appeal to Caesar. When Caesar speaks, the matter is 
closed. Nothing more simple can be thought of ! 

This passion for definiteness possessed the whole world at 
that time. Everything must be set in order, finished, and 
done with. The limits of the world were closely defined. 
The Roman world consisted of that portion of the earth's 
surface that lay round about the middle sea. It extended 
in the East to the Indus, in the South to the desert, in the West 
to the Ocean, in the North to the forests ; within these con- 
fines lay the civilized world as it was known to the Graeco- 
Roman of the day. To the East were people whom the 
Roman did not consider it worth while to conquer, to the 
North were the hyperborean forests, the haunt of wild beasts 
and still wilder men ; to the South were the trackless sands ; 
to the West the trackless waters, to the Northwest lay Britain 
the ultima Thule of the Roman world. What lay beyond 
the western waters and below the southern sands the Roman 
did not know, nor did he care to know. The Roman mind 
is so constituted that it does not care for what it does not 
know. It is, as a mind, seldom or never haunted by the 
unknown. 

The earth of the Roman was a half sphere, hollow under- 
neath, resting on pillars. If one went too far to the east or 
too far to the west, one would fall off, so one would better 
stay at home than to try to wander to the confines of the 
earth. The sky was considered to be a solid sphere in which 
the heavenly bodies were placed as a jeweler places stones in 
a setting. This sphere was manifold, — crystals within crys- 
tals moving in cycles and epicycles over the earth. The sun 
made its circuit through the signs of the zodiac once a year. 
These motions of the sun and the planets were explained with 
great minuteness by the astronomers of the day. If one 
could not understand the astronomers, that was one's own 



160 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

fault and one for one's safety had best leave the stars alone 
and devote his attention to women, — they were less dan- 
gerous. 

The languages, Greek and Roman, were finished and in 
the keeping of the grammarians. This age had no Homers, 
but it did have a Quintilian. Thought was in bondage to 
logic and must not presume to use any other method than 
that laid down. 

Aristotle was the supreme authority in the world of 
thought ; Ptolemy in that of astronomy. There was no such 
thing as geology or biology known to the Graeco-Roman mind. 
The historian was an analyst, without critical faculty to dis- 
tinguish myth and legend from sober fact, and so, to our great 
advantage, preserved for us the tales of shepherds as of 
equal value with the speeches of statesmen. 

Such was the Graeco-Roman world in the days of its crys- 
tallization, — perfect as a crystal and dead as a crystal. There 
was in that world no place for the gods; Divus Caesar, the 
God of the Organization, was equal to the task of managing 
the organization, and the management of the organization was 
all that the situation called for. The Graeco-Roman civiliz- 
ation was unimaginative, uninspired, unoriginal. Its poets 
were dead, its philosophers were dead, its thinkers were dead, 
its gods were dead, and it lived on the imagination, the ra- 
tiocination, and the emotion that had come down to it from 
a greater and a living past. 

The household gods still received their libations, but the 
household itself was no longer sacred, the Pater-familias was 
a man-about-town and the Mater-familias a woman of pleas- 
ure. Hosts of slaves swarmed in and out of the houses, 
hardly known to and hardly knowing their masters. The old 
Italio-Greek gods were worshipped and laughed at in turn. 
The religion of the city was gone with the freedom of the city, 
and the gods of the cities were pensioners upon the bounty 
of Divus Caesar. These gods might be and were the official 
gods of the State, so long as they did not interfere directly 
or indirectly with the affairs of the State ; the worship of them 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 161 

was encouraged as necessary to the safety of the state, — and 
if they could do nothing else, they could keep the people quiet. 
Gods from all the world came flocking to Rome to share 
in the benefits of Imperial protection and Imperial bounty. 
Mithra from Persia and Isis from Egypt were more popular 
than either Jupiter or Juno, — the one, Mithra, with the sol- 
diers, and the other, with the women of fashion. Vulgarity 
was the keynote of the religion of the day. The proselyte 
of Mithra stood under a butchered bull and bathed himself in 
its blood. A devotee of Isis (a wealthy lady) was easily per- 
suaded to occupy the couch of the goddess, while in the dark- 
ness some lusty priest played, — to her satisfaction, — the part 
of the god Anubis. Love philters and charms, blest of Venus, 
were sold on the corners of the street ; fakirs with drums 
preached salvation to gaping crowds ; gods were a cheap and 
a plenty ; one could buy a god for an as 1 and sell a god for an 
as on any day in the week in the cities of the Roman Empire. 

Jehovah, the God of the Bene-Israel, had fallen into the 
same state of degradation. The means he had devised to 
keep his name alive after the loss of his city had been his 
temporary undoing. As the God of the Book he was subject 
to the dangers of the book. He was liable to misinterpreta- 
tion, to misunderstanding, to the loss of personality and vit- 
ality. He was no longer a living god, but a written god. If 
one wanted to find Jehovah in those days of degradation, one 
did not seek him with Abraham in the defiles of Lebanon; 
nor wrestle with him in the night, as did Jacob at Jabbok; 
nor turn aside to see him, as Moses did at the burning bush ; 
one went, instead, to the synagogue, not to find Jehovah, but 
to hear tell of him ; not to listen to his voice, but 
to hear what some prophet of old had said about him. In 
those days there was no open vision. God was not a living 
person, he was a recorded memory. He was not a free god 
going before his people ; he was a god bound hand and foot 
in the meshes of the law of his own making. Little laws 
and big laws held him fast. When one went to the syn- 

1 A small Roman coin. 



162 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

agogue one did not even hear of God Jehovah, one only heard 
graybeard scribe wrangling with graybeard scribe as to which 
was the great commandment of the law. Jehovah was at 
the mercy of the lawyers who used him to exploit the people. 
Poor Jehovah ! what he had written he had written, and his 
own word was used against him. He was the god of the 
Jew, and no Gentile need apply. He was coming, accord- 
ing to the book, to put the Gentile in a pit and the Jew on a 
throne. The Gentile, hearing this, went away in a rage, and 
would have nothing to do with Jehovah. 

So it was with all the gods: fast bound to their past they 
could give no help to the present and no hope to the future. 
They had to stand by and see the people become the prey 
of Divus Caesar and his organization. 

After the death and deification of Augustus Caesar, Divus 
C?esar was incarnate in the person of Tiberius Claudius, — 
the son of Xero and Livia, — a world-weary, embittered 
man, whose life had been outraged from the moment of his 
conception to the day of his accession to imperial power. 
His mother was divorced from his father at the command of 
Augustus to become the wife of Augustus. 

Tiberius in his youth was hate4 by all the Julian family, 
into which by his mother's marriage he was incorporated ; in 
his manhood was compelled to divorce his own beloved wife, 
Agrippina, and marry the Emperor's wanton daughter, 
Julia ; was exiled from Rome, finding in his exile release from 
sorrow; and, coming to the throne in middle age, found him- 
self the center of continual conspiracy. Forced to put men 
to death whom he would gladly have let live, in desperation 
he renounced the world, and committing the government to 
his freedman Sejanus, Tiberius retired to his villa at Capri, 
to practice (according to the libidinous gossip of Rome) the 
most shameful debaucheries; to brood (according to better 
authority) over the misery of life. Poor, great, beautiful, 
sorrowful, Tiberius Claudius Nero-Ca?sar, and Augustus, — 
Imperator and God ! Never was there a god more miserable 
than this same Tiberius Claudius Nero, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 163 

After him came the mad wretch Caligula; to be succeeded 
by the stupid Claudius, and after him the buffoon Nero. 
Thus that old world went dancing down the ways of death 
to the hell that was waiting for it. Insanity at the top and 
leprosy at the bottom ! It was a sick, mad world, with not 
a god in sight to help it. 



Book VI 
THE GOD CHRISTUS 



CHAPTER XXXII 

A New God Comes to Rome 

On the night of the 18th of July, in the year 64 A.D., a fire 
started in the wooden booth of the Circus Maximus in the 
City of Rome, which, after raging for over a week, left the 
greater part of the city in ashes and the mass of the people 
homeless and starving. The origin of this fire was by pop- 
ular rumor ascribed to the Emperor Nero. It was said that 
he had caused the city to be set on fire that he might ex- 
perience the sensations of Priam at the burning of Troy. 
Whether true or false, this rumor occasioned the Emperor 
distress and alarm. Egoist that he was, he could not help 
knowing that he was hated and despised as no man was ever 
before hated and despised. A matricide and an adulterer, 
he had offended the moral sense even of the corrupt society 
of the imperial city ; a buffoon, — taking to the stage and 
playing a part in the company of slaves, — he had out- 
raged the dignity of the Empire; scorned by the great, held 
in horror by the low, this last of the Julian Claudian family 
felt the chill of approaching doom. The fire in Rome, 
whether of his making or not, inflamed the people against 
him to a hotter indignation, and the saying went abroad that 
"Nero fiddled while Rome burned." 

To divert suspicion from himself, Nero accused a certain 
obscure sect of people, called "Christians," of having started 
the fire. Properly to punish these wretches, and at the same 
time to amuse the people, the Emperor Nero made a revel 
in his gardens, to which all Rome was made welcome, and he 
caused these the accused Christians to be covered with tar, 
tied to pillars, and burned as torches to light the revels. As 
he turned in and out among the torches, driving his chariots, 

167 



168 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

he and all the people heard, rising above the roaring of the 
flames, a mad, glad cry from the lips of tortured dying men 
and women: "Christianns sum!" — "I am a Christian!" Thus, 
did Emperor and people learn that night that a new god 
had come to Rome. 

This god was from the first most obnoxious to the rulers 
of the city. They despised him as a low-born god, and 
hated and feared him because he stirred up the dregs of the 
people to discontent and sedition. The Caesar could find 
no place in his Pantheon for this god, for none of the other 
gods would keep company with him, nor would he associate 
with them. They were the gods of the ruling leisure class, 
he was the god of the oppressed working class ; they were the 
gods of the past, he was the god of the future. Between this 
new god and the old gods there was an irrepressible conflict. 
They were the gods of the physical, he the god of the moral 
order, 

The followers of this god were the offscouring of the 
earth, — broken slaves, thieves, and harlots, — persons for 
whom the better classes had a loathing and a horror such 
as men have for vermin. This attitude of the educated rul- 
ing class toward this new god and his people, is expressed by 
Cornelius Tacitus, one of the keenest minds of his or any 
age. Writing in the reign of Trajan of the doings of Nero, 
for whom his hatred and horror were unbounded, in speaking 
of the great fire he says : 

"Nero fastened the guilt [of the fire] and inflicted the 
most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abomina- 
tions, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from 
whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty 
during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our pro- 
curators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous supersti- 
tion, thus checked for the moment, broke out again not only 
in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where 
all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world 
find their center and become popular. Accordingly an arrest 
was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then upon their 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 169 

information an immense multitude was convicted, not so 
much of the crime of firing the city as of hatred against man- 
kind. Covered with skins of beasts they were torn by dogs 
and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to 
flames and burnt to serve as nightly illumination, when day- 
light had expired. 

Nero offered his garden for the spectacle, and was ex- 
hibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the 
people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft in a car. 
Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exem- 
plary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for 
it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut 
one man's cruelty that they were being destroyed." 1 

So wrote the most acute mind of his generation of the god 
and the people of the coming age, — who were to give their 
name to an era and transform the Roman world into their 
likeness. A warning to all writers of all ages not to be 
hasty in judgment nor to despise the lowest of the people. 

It is not strange that Tacitus and the men of his class 
should have so misjudged this god Christus and his religion. 
The origin of this god was obscure, and, from their point 
of view, despicable. He was a working-man and a Jew, — 
a member of a degraded class and the offspring of a des- 
pised race. In fact, we ourselves, had we known of Christus 
no more than Tacitus knew, should never have thought of 
him as a god, but only, at the best, as a foolish man, one 
of that kind of men whom Napoleon despised and called 
ideologists, — men who think to rule the world through the 
medium of ideas. If we had been of the ruling class we 
would have said of this man that he was not onlv foolish 
but wicked, — a demagogue, an insane egoist, stirring up the 
people to hope for that which could never be; deluding and 
deluded, thinking himself a god while he was in reality a 
criminal. 

1 "Annals of Tacitus," A. F. Church, W. J. Brodribb : Macmillan & 
Co. ; London, 1884. 



170 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

There was nothing in the origin of this man or in his early 
history that gave the least indication that he would attain 
to the rank of the greater gods. He was the son of a carpenter, 
a native of the obscure town of Nazareth, in upper Galilee, 
a town out of which it was said nothing good could come. 
He never went, to our knowledge, out of that countryside in 
the which he was born, except to go down when he was 
twelve years old to the city of Jerusalem, as was the custom 
of his people, and again at the end of his life. He seems to 
have been without ambition to be other than he was and 
spent the early years of his manhood contentedly working 
at his trade as a carpenter. He secured his education at the 
school of the synagogue, as did the other Jewish boys in his 
village. During his youth and early manhood he did not 
give any promise of his future greatness. We can hardly 
conjecture what was going on in that soul that was later to 
flame out with the consuming fires of righteous anger, and 
give forth burning words that were, like brands blown by 
the winds, to carry the fire of this soul to the ends of the 
earth. 

This young man was known to his neighbors as Joshua 
ben Joseph. When he comes to the notice of history his 
father was, probably, dead, since no mention is made of 
Joseph in connection with the active life of his illustrious 
son, Joshua (or, as he came to be known to the English- 
speaking world, Jesus) was living unmarried with his mother, 
— whose name was Miriam, or Mary, — and his brothers and 
sisters in their home in Nazareth of Galilee, when an event 
occurred in his life that carried him out of his obscurity into 
his eternal fame, — an event that has given to this Nazarene 
carpenter the rank of an immortal god. 

When he was about thirty years old there came a report 
to Nazareth of a certain Yohanan, or John, who was preach- 
ing in the Wilderness of Judea, proclaiming the approach of 
that kingdom of God, which was the hope and expectation 
of all the people of the Jews. This John seemed to those 
who heard him as one of the old prophets. Like Elijah the 
Tishbite, he came out of obscurity, to upbraid the wickedness 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 171 

of the rulers of his people. Herod the King, the princes, 
and the priests came under the lash of his scathing denunci- 
ation ; to the people he preached repentance and deliverance 
to come. Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the region 
round about heard of the fame of this preacher in the Wilder- 
ness, and the people went out in crowds to hear him. He 
was the man of the hour. 

In an early and now forgotten history of Jesus the son of 
Joseph of Nazareth, we are told that Mary, the mother of 
Jesus, said to him and to his brothers : 

"Come, let us go and hear this preacher of whom every 
one is talking." 

Jesus said: 

"What does he preach?" 

Mary answered : 

"He preaches repentance from sin and righteousness toward 
God." 

Jesus turned back to his bench, saying: 

"Why should I go to hear him? I am not a sinner, that 
I should repent." 

And Mary and his brothers went their way. Then Jesus 
reflected and said to himself: It may be a sin for me not to 
go and hear this man. If this word is from God it will surely 
do me good, if not, it can do me no harm. Then Jesus made 
haste and followed his mother and his brothers and came to 
where John was preaching in the wilderness of Judea. 1 

Upon what little hinges do the great doors of des- 
tiny turn ! How insignificant are beginnings ! A band of 
shepherds seek security on a hilltop by the Tiber, and there 
follows the Empire of Rome. Another band of shepherds 
faint in the Desert of Zin, and their cry for deliverance is the 
birthcry of an universal religion. A young man moved by 
compunction follows his mother and his brothers to listen 
to a preacher in the wilderness, and we have a new era. 
Who can tell to-day from what corner of the sky the little 

1 The Gospel to the Hebrews. 



172 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

cloud is rising that to-morrow will darken the whole heavens? 
Jesus, as he walked from Nazareth to the Wilderness of 
Judea, did not know that the road he was following would 
lead him to the death of a criminal and to the throne of a 
god. 

When he came into the presence of that preacher he heard 
words that stirred the depths of his soul as the tempest stirs 
the deeps of the sea. Great waves of thought and feeling 
swept over him and carried him away from his quiet moor- 
ings out into the stress and storm of a life that ended in his 
death on a cross. Between his baptism by John and his 
death on Calvary this young man had been revealed to him- 
self and the world as the greatest spiritual genius the race 
of men had ever known. So great was he that he seemed to 
himself and to those nearest him to be none other than the 
Christ, the Son of the Living God. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

Jesus and the Resurrection 

When Paul was preaching in the Market Place of Athens, 
he seemed to those who heard him to be a ''setter forth of 
strange gods," because he preached "Jesus and the Resur- 
rection." Paul was primarily the Apostle of the Resurrection. 
He did not know Jesus in the flesh. In all his writings he 
makes no reference to any incident in the earthly life of the 
Master; what the Lord did and said as he walked and talked 
with his disciples in Galilee did not interest Paul ; the career 
of Jesus began for him after his death. It was the risen 
Lord that Paul preached ; it is the risen Lord who for twenty 
centuries has been worshipped as a God by the Christian 
church. If Christ be not risen, then we are told that all 
Christian faith is vain. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 173 

It is the waning belief in the resurrection of Jesus as a 
fact in the physical universe that is bringing about the dis- 
solution of the Christian religion. It is impossible for a 
mind trained in the modern scientific method to accept the 
popular conception of the resurrection of Jesus. His appear- 
ances after his death and his bodily ascension into the sky are 
in such contradiction to physical law, so foreign to ail human 
experience, that the modern mind refuses all consideration to 
these phenomena, — phenomena that for the trained intelli- 
gence have no validity in the outward physical world of force 
and matter, belonging rather to the region of the psychic. 

The resurrection of Jesus is not a problem in physics, it 
is a problem in psychology. 

In undertaking the investigation of the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ as a problem in psychology, I am conscious of 
the difficulty, the danger, and the delicacy of my adventure. 
I am reopening that which, for the majority of men and 
women, is a closed question. Whether one be a believer or 
a disbeliever in the resurrection as an event in outward hu- 
man history, one is apt to think that one knows all that can 
be known in regard to it. Further comment is to the be- 
liever irreverent, to the disbeliever useless. The subject is 
so involved with religious emotions that all discussion is 
dangerous. The writer must proceed with great delicacy lest 
he offend the convictions and wound the sensibilities of his 
readers and so defeat the purpose of his writing. But in 
spite of the difficulty, the danger and the delicacy, the writer 
goes forward in the full assurance that by means of scientific 
psychology many, — if not all, — the phenomena of the resur- 
rection may be explained, its perplexities unraveled, and this 
vastly important event removed from its present isolation and 
given its place in the natural order of the universe. 

Before proceeding further with our enterprise, it is neces- 
sary for us to know that we are dealing with a resurrection 
and not with a resuscitation. The theory advanced by some 
that the phenomena of the resurrection can be accounted for 
on the supposition that Jesus was not dead when his body 
was taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb ; that 



174 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

he was only in a swoon from which he revived and came 
forth from the sepulchre alive ; that he retired to some secret 
place where he was visited from time to time by his disciples, 
who went forth from this living presence to preach the death, 
the resurrection, and the second coming of Jesus as the sav- 
ing power of a religion that converted a Western world. This 
theory substitutes a base for a divine miracle, and makes 
fraud the handmaid of truth. 

But the universe is not so ordered. So futile a cause could 
never produce such consequence. If Jesus had not died on 
the cross, his after life would have been an anti-climax, fruit- 
ful of no results. These a priori arguments are sustained by 
the fact that there is no evidence of any kind to uphold the 
theory of resuscitation. The creed of Christendom is divinely 
true in affirming that Jesus died and rose again from the 
dead. He was to the church a resurrected and not a resusci- 
tated personality. 

Having dismissed as without warrant, the supposition of 
a resuscitation, we must now ask ourselves what a resur- 
rection is and how it differs from a resuscitation. But when 
we ask the question: What is a resurrection? we are met 
by the almost overwhelming difficulty that, according to 
current belief, there never in all the experience of mankind 
has been but one resurrection from the dead. Of the bil- 
lions and billions of human beings who have lived and died, 
only one has come back again from the dead and showed 
himself alive to his friends. The resurrection of Jesus is 
unique. It is not to be compared to the supposed manifes- 
tations of departed souls by means of spiritual mediums. 
These manifestations, while they may indicate the soul's sur- 
vival of death, have no relation that we can see to human 
life. The resurrection of Jesus, as we shall learn, is one of 
the mightiest events of human history. It is the efficient cause 
of Christendom and all that Christendom means to mankind. 

The Greek word anastdsis, and the Latin word resurrectus 
mean "standing up," — rising from the supine to the erect 
position ; as when a man gets out of his bed onto his feet 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 175 

and, in the fullness of resumed strength, stands up to face 
the issues of life. Resuscitation implies feebleness ; resur- 
rection, power. 

Bearing this meaning in mind, we proceed to inquire as 
to the mode of Jesus' resurrection, in what way he, after his 
death, rose again from the dead, and standing up, became 
more powerful in death than he had ever been in life. And 
this inquiry is purely historical, we cannot deal with it apart 
from the facts in the case. We must analyze the evidence, — 
must follow the vast stream of Christian thought and feeling, 
in which the belief in the resurrection is carried, to its sources 
in the hills of antiquity. 



CHAPTER XXXIV 

The Magdalene Tradition 

The earliest account of the resurrection (save one) that 
has come down to us is contained in a short narrative of the 
life of Jesus known to us as the Gospel according to Mark. 
In this account, we are told that three women, — Mary Mag- 
dalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, — went to 
the sepulchre of Jesus very early on the Sunday morning 
following his crucifixion and death, which occurred on Fri- 
day, to complete the ritual of anointing his body, which the 
haste of his burial had prevented on the day of his entomb- 
ment. When they come to the sepulchre they find, to their 
relief and their astonishment, that the great stone that blocks 
the door of the tomb is rolled away. Entering the tomb 
they find it empty of the body of Jesus, but they see a young 
man sitting on the right side clothed in a long white gar- 
ment, and they were affrighted. And the young man said 
unto them: 



176 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

"Be not affrighted. 'Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was 
crucified ; he is risen ; he is not here : behold the place where 
they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter 
that he goeth before you into Galilee : there shall ye see him 
as he said unto you.' And they went out quickly and fled 
from the sepulchre ; for they trembled and were amazed : 
neither said they anything to any man for they were afraid." 

And that is all. In the more ancient manuscripts the Gos- 
pel of Mark end with these words: 

y.a! ojBcVi oi>££v etxov e^o^ouvto ~fxp 

The last twelve verses of the Gospel as found in our Eng- 
lish version are not genuine. 

So this little pool of woman's fears and woman's tears is 
the apparent source of that mighty stream of religious 
thought, feeling, and action which we are exploring. 

This Gospel is by many years the earliest of the Gospel 
histories, and in it is the deposit of the popular thought and 
feeling of the newborn Christian community. Only one ac- 
count of the resurrection is earlier than this of Mark. 

As we follow the stream of tradition downward, we see, 
as Matthew Arnold says, "A legend growing under our eyes." 
The account of the resurrection in the Gospel of Matthew is 
based upon the story of Mark. The women go to the sepul- 
chre early Sunday morning; they see the angel, who repeats 
the words and the commands of the angel of Mark: "Go 
quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; 
and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee ; there shall ye 
see him : lo, I have told you." 

The legendary accretions of this Gospel tell of the earth- 
quake that rolls away the stone from the door of the sepul- 
chre ; of the Roman soldiers, keepers of the tomb, who flee in 
fright to the Pharisees with news of the resurrection and are 
bribed into silence; this legend also has the women see Jesus 
himself in the garden, who repeats to them the command of 
the angel: "Go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee; 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 177 

there shall they see mc." In obedience to this direction of 
the angel, Matthew tells us that the eleven apostles went 
into Galilee to a certain mountain which Jesus had appointed. 
There Jesus appeared to them, gave them general directions 
as to the conversion of the world and then disappeared. There 
was no formal ascension, only an appearance and a disap- 
pearance. Matthew's Gospel is of Hebraistic origin, and its 
purpose is to preserve the teachings rather than to tell the 
life of Jesus. 

When we pass from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew 
into the Gospel of Luke, we find ourselves in an entirely 
different region of thought and feeling. The Christian move- 
ment is slowly losing its purely Hebraistic character, — it is 
in process of Hellenization. The writer of this Gospel is 
Grecian and a scholar. The introduction to the Gospel is in 
the purest Attic style, worthy of the age of Pericles. This 
writer is a poet of the first rank, and uses a poet's license 
freely in his composition ; he belongs to the second genera- 
tion of Christian 7 , and frankly bases his narrative not upon 
ervation but upon hearsay. 

When this Gospel was written Christianity was already 
forgetting its Galilean origin ; its home was Jerusalem, from 
whence it was going forth to the conquest of the world. 
Luke's account of the resurrection is controlled by the Jeru- 
salem tradition. He follows the garden story of Mark and 
Matthew. But the angel, in his account, does not give the 
command to the women to go and tell the disciples to go 
into Galilee, where they shall see the Lord ; but he bases 
the resurrection on a saying of Jesus made in Galilee. Speak- 
ing of Jesus the angel says: "lie is not here, he is risen; re- 
member how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, 
saying the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of 
sinful men and be crucified and slain, and the third day rise 
in, and they remembered the words." It is evident that 
we have here not the words of the angel but the afterthought 
of the church. 

In Luke's account the women do not see Jesus in the 
garden,— they see only the angels, of which there are two. 



178 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

They hurry from the tomb to the city and tell the assembled 
disciples what they have seen and heard. The disciples give 
no credence to the words of the women ; only Peter goes to 
the sepulchre and sees the empty tomb. 

In the afternoon of that day Jesus falls in with certain 
disciples, who are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and 
talks with them about his own death, explaining its signifi- 
cance. These disciples do not recognize him until he makes 
himself known to them in the breaking of bread. Having 
made himself known he vanishes. At this the disciples rise 
up and make haste and return to Jerusalem, where they find 
their fellow-disciples assembled in a certain room, in a wild 
state of excitement. As they enter the room, the disciples 
from Emmaus are greeted with a cry to which particular at- 
tention should be given, because in this cry is an important 
clue to the mysteries we are probing. As the disciples from 
Emmaus enter the room in Jerusalem, they are greeted with 
the words: "The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to 
Simon." 

Almost immediately upon the arrival of the disciples from 
Emmaus, while the doors are shut in the room where they 
are gathered together, Jesus himself appears in the midst, 
eats fish, and submits to handling to prove that he is alive, 
preaches to them of his death and resurrection, commands 
them to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit, 
and then he takes them all out as far as Bethany, where, in 
their sight, he formally ascends into the heavens. 

The whole transaction transpires in Jerusalem and its 
vicinity, and the formal ascension apparently takes place on 
the evening of the day of the resurrection. 

In the Gospel of John, the Hellenizing tendencies which 
we discovered in Luke have transformed to a great degree 
the character and mission of Jesus. He is no longer so much 
the Messiah of Jewish expectation as he is the Logos of 
Grecian speculation. This Gospel is of low historical value. 
It is not so much a history of the life of Jesus as it is an 
interpretation of his character and mission. The book was 
written not earlier than the second decade of the second 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 179 

century and some scholars assert that it belongs to the 
fourth decade of that century. The writer's conception of 
Jesus is in startling contrast with that of Mark, Matthew, 
and Luke. His Jesus is more a Greek, — or rather an Ori- 
ental, — philosopher than he is a Hebrew prophet. 

In its account of the resurrection, John's Gospel follows 
closely that of Luke. Mary Magdalene goes alone to the 
garden, sees the angel who tells her of the resurrection. She 
hurries away and tells Peter and John, who, at her word, 
run together to the sepulchre. John outruns Peter, but does 
not go in. Peter comes up and goes in and sees the linen 
clothes of the dead lying in the sepulchre. 

Meantime Mary Magdalene has seen Jesus himself in the 
garden. 

That same evening, when the disciples are gathered to- 
gether in a certain room, when the doors are shut, Jesus sud- 
denly appears, breathes on them, saying: "Receive ye the 
Holy Ghost. Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted 
unto them ; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." 
And then he disappeared. 

A week later he reappears under the same conditions, sub- 
mits to the handling of Thomas, and disappears once more. 

There is no formal ascension. 

The Twenty-first Chapter of John,— which is of doubtful 
authenticity, insomuch that it is rejected by some textual 
critics and bracketed by all, — gives an account of a belated 
appearance of Jesus to his disciples at Lake Gennesaret in 
Galilee, where the Lord makes himself known by a miracu- 
lous draught of fishes. But this is so clearly a reminiscence 
of the account of this miracle in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, — 
who place it early in the Galilean ministry, — that this story 
of John is without historical value. 

When we sum up the testimony to the resurrection as 
given us in the Gospels, we find that all the appearances of 
Jesus recorded by Mark occur in Galilee. In Matthew the 
women see Jesus in the garden. In Luke all these appear- 
ances are in Jerusalem, in John the main appearances are in 



180 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Jerusalem, with a belated, unhistorical appearance in Galilee. 
Only in Luke is there a formal ascension. 

In all of the accounts, except Matthew, special mention is 
made of Peter. And in all the accounts, without exception, 
Mary Magdalene is the first to see the risen Lord. It is this 
fact which gave rise to the celebrated passage in Renan's 
"Origins of Christianity." This writer says: 

"For the historian the life of Jesus ends with his death. 
But so deep was the impression which he made upon the 
hearts of his disciples and upon some devout women that 

for them he was for several days alive and consoling 

Whether the body of Jesus was taken from the tomb, whether 
excited religious emotion always credulous, created the evi- 
dence to sustain the resurrection? this fos want of peremp- 
tory evidence we shall never know, but we can confidently 
affirm that in this transaction Mary Magdalene had the prin- 
cipal part. Divine power of love! ! 1 moments in which 
the passion of an hallucinated woman pave to the world a 
resurrected God." 

As we read these words of the French sarcrnt we are un- 
easy in our minds: nor can we rest content with the saying 
of Matthew Arnold, which is partly true, tint we see a legend 
growing under our eyes, or as we might more poetically ex- 
press it, we are present at the blooming of a i us Mythos 
with its promise of a new seedtime and harvest. We can- 
not stop our investigation with this easy solution. We can- 
not think that the greatest of realities had its origin in the 
vaguest of unrealities. We have not yet solved our prob- 
lem. We have not yet accounted for the ap; ce in Gali- 
lee, nor for the Petrine tradition. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 181 

CHAPTER XXXV 

The Petrine Tradition 

When we pass from the Gospels to the Epistles we are not 
going- forward but backward in time. We are reascending 
the hills of antiquity, where we shall discover another well- 
spring of thought and feeling, the source of a tradition distinct 
and different from that which we have already examined, which 
at first obscure and uncertain, gradually reveals itself as the 
great river of Christian doctrine and discipline, to which the 
stream issuing from the sepulchre at Jerusalem is only a 
tributary. 

The Gospels are not the earliest written records of Chris- 
tian history. This place of honor is occupied by the letters 
of Paul to the various churches he founded. Of these letters 
the first Epistle to the Corinthians is most important to our 
present investigation. In that letter Paul gives an account 
of the resurrection which antedates that of Mark by at least 
twenty years. Paul makes the resurrection the sine qua non 
of Christianity. No resurrection, no Christianity. If Christ 
is not risen, then our faith is vain. It is to be supposed, there- 
fore, that Paul would buttress this necessary doctrine with 
every testimony, every argument that could be broug'ht to its 
support. But, strange to say, Paul did not know, or did not 
value, the story of the women who went to the tomb on the 
morning of the resurrection. 

Paul was an educated man, trained to discriminate between 
the important and the unimportant, and his account of the 
resurrection has all the conciseness and clearness of a scien- 
tific formula. This formula is as follows*. 

Moreover, I declare unto yon the Gospel which I preached unto you, which 
also ye have received, and 'wherein ye stand ; by which also ye are saved ; if 
ye hold fast the word which I preached unto 3 r ou, except ye believe in vain, for 
I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ 
died for our sins according to the scripture; and that he was buried, and 
that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures: And that 



182 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

he was seen of Cephus, then of the twelve; After that he was seen of 
about five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain 
until this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen of 
James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, 
as to one born out of due time. 

I 

This account of the resurrection Paul received from the 

apostles in Jerusalem. It expresses the mind of the primi- 
tive church ; and as we see, the primal source of the belief in 
the resurrection was not Mary Magdalene but Cephus, which 
is Aramaic for Peter. 

We have further and conclusive evidence of the mind of 
the church in this matter in a saying in the Gospel of Luke, 
to which our attention was called when we examined that 
document, when the disciples from Emmaus came to the dis- 
ciples in Jerusalem on the afternoon of resurrection day, we 
remember, that according to Luke, they from Emmaus were 
greeted by those in Jerusalem with the cry "The Lord is 
risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon." There could 
not be stronger evidence that in the mind of the church Peter, 
not Mary Magdalene, was the first to see the risen Lord. And 
it is this fact which has given. Peter the place which he holds 
in Christian history. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 
The Character of Peter 

We must now, in the course of our investigation, with- 
draw our attention from Mary Magdalene, and even from 
Jesus himself, and focus our thought upon Peter; for in the 
character of Peter and in his relation to Jesus lie the solu- 
tion of our problem. 

Peter was a Galilean peasant, a fisherman by occupation; 
he was a man of simple mind and ardent feeling; he was a 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 183 

passionate patriot ; he hated the Roman dominion, and longed 
for its overthrow. Galilee in those days was seething with 
discontent and sedition, and the heart of Peter was in unison 
with the heart of his people. He fed his heart on the hope 
and expectation of the coming of the Messiah, who would 
put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble 
and meek, who would raise up the tabernacle of David that 
was fallen down and restore the Kingdom of Israel. The 
preaching of John the Baptist had stirred all Jewry, and 
without doubt Peter came under the power of this prophet. 
He was longing for the moment of action to come. He needed 
only a leader to give himself unqualifiedly to the cause of the 
redemption of Israel. 

And the leader came, and in Peter found a man instinct 
with the genius of the follower. Such following is necessary 
to all leadership. The genius of the leader is not more rare 
than the genius of the follower. The follower must be a 
man without initiative, without personal ambition. He must 
be the alter ego of his leader. He must divine his leader's 
mind, think his leader's thoughts, execute his leader's de- 
signs. Such followers are second only to their leaders in im- 
portance, without them the leader is powerless to accom- 
plish. Napoleon found such a follower in Berthier, Grant in 
Rawlins, — Jesus in Peter. 

When Peter attached himself to Jesus, he was in the full 
prime of his manhood. The follower was years older than 
the Master, and he came to have for him that unselfish af- 
fection which the elder has for the younger. Peter's love for 
Jesus was like the love of Jonathan for David; "passing the 
love of women," it had all the ardor of the devotion of Mar- 
shall Ney for Bonaparte. It is clear, from all accounts, that 
from the very first Peter ranked next to Jesus in the company 
that followed the Master in the Galilean period. His name 
always comes first in any list of Jesus' following, and it has 
maintained its primacy to the present hour. 

When Jesus entered upon his public ministry after his 
baptism by John, he did nothing else but continue the work 
of his forerunner. He took up the cry of the Baptist: "Re- 



184 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

pent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" This cry was 
full of meaning to Jewish ears ; it meant nothing less than 
the coming of the Messiah, who in the name and power of 
Jehovah, the Jewish God, should break the power of the 
Gentiles and give to Israel freedom and dominion in the 
earth. 

But while the message of John and Jesus was the same, 
their method of delivering it was widely different. John 
was primarily a preacher, Jesus was essentially a teacher. 
John was a man of emotion, Jesus a man of thought; John 
was a man of the desert, Jesus a man of the town and the 
countryside; John proclaimed the kingdom of God, Jesus ex- 
plained it; John had hearers, Jesus had scholars; John 
preached to a congregation, Jesus taught a school. And of 
these scholars of Jesus, Peter was the most eager. He aban- 
doned his ordinary way of living, he left his boats and nets 
on the lakeside and became a peripatetic pupil of a peripat- 
etic teacher. His untutored mind was as wax to receive the 
teachings of the Master. The world of the mind of Jesus 
was reproduced in the mind of Peter. Peter's want of or- 
iginality made his nature capacious to store the original 
thinking of Jesus. 



CHAPTER XXXVII 

Peter Proclaimed Jesus Messiah 

As far as we can gather from the evidence at hand, we 
conclude that toward the end of its second year the mission 
of Jesus came to a crisis. His teaching had alienated the 
rulers and wearied the people. So far as he was concerned 
the promised kingdom of God was degenerating into another 
rabbinical school. He was to outward seeming only an- 
other scribe squabbling with the scribes of the older schools. 



THE WAYS OP THE GODS 185 

His popularity was waning, his spirit failing. Jesus con- 
ceived of the kingdom of God in terms of righteousness and 
holiness. He was that saddest of ail men, the preacher of ab- 
solute truth in a relative world; Before the kingdom of God 
that he preached could come, men must be just and women 
pure. 

The preaching of Jesus was revolutionary. He denied the 
right of property and the lawfulness of government. He 
seemed to expect that at his preaching the rich would abandon 
their wealth and the rulers their seats of authority. But all 
iiis preaching accomplished was the irritation of the possess- 
ing classes, the discontent of the multitude. All this teach- 
ing and preaching seemed to come to nothing. The funda- 
mentals of the kingdom had been explained and reexplained, 
but no superstructure had risen on this foundation. The 
people would not respond to the teaching. In his impa- 
tience Jesus cried: "O, evil and adulterous generation, how 
long shall I be with you, how long shall I suffer you?" 

This impatience of the Master communicated itself to his 
following; they had had enough of talk, they wanted action. 
They knew what the coming kingdom ought to be ; now let 
the coming kingdom come. 

In this time of hesitation and distress Jesus led his dis- 
ciples to the borders of the land of Israel. He came to 
Csesarea-Phillipi, and his face was toward the west. He had 
but to go forward and leave behind him the hostility of the 
rulers and the indifference of the people. But he would also 
leave behind the hope and expectation of the Jews; he would 
ndon the kingdom of God; his lever would be without 
fulcrum, and he not a prophet of God but only a teacher of 
wisdom. And of teachers of wisdom there were a plenty in 
the world. 

At this critical moment in the history of Jesus and of 
religion Peter interposed, saved the leadership of Jesus from 
ruin, and made possible for Jesus that career that has placed 
him at the right hand of God and given him the worship 
of the most advanced races of mankind. Peter proclaimed 
the Messiahship of Jesus. 



186 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

It is not clear from the evidence whether Jesus from the 
first thought of himself as the king of the kingdom that he 
preached. There is an uncertainty, a fluctuation in his 
thought, which makes it difficult to determine just what his 
attitude toward the Messiahship was. In his early teaching 
he seems to think of the kingdom of God as an inward prin- 
ciple rather than as an outward institution. The children of 
the kingdom were the poor in spirit, the meek, those thirst- 
ing for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the 
peace makers, the persecuted. It was not "lo, here, nor lo, 
there, for the kingdom of God was within." It was not an 
outward polity, it was an inward state. But this quiet piet- 
ism could only be personal ; it could not be social ; it could 
not be organic. It might be the kingdom of God ; it could 
never be the kingdom of David. It might save the human 
soul; it could not deliver the people of Israel. It is the 
tragedy of the life of Jesus that he had to reconcile these 
antagonistic conceptions. He knew in his soul that he was 
the child of God; but was he the king of the Jews? 

It was at Caesarea-Phillipi that Jesus paused to take account 
of himself. Who was he? what was he? He turned in 
his sore perplexity to his followers and asked them : 

"Whom do men say that I am?" 

They answered : 

"Some say you are John the Baptist, and some that you 
are one of the old prophets." 

Still more anxiously Jesus asks: 

"But whom do ye say that I am?" 

Peter answered at once : 

"Thou art the Christ of God." 

Magnificent words! — giving Jesus the spiritual leadership 
of the world, and Peter a power second only to that of his 
Master. 

Jesus accepted the proclamation of Peter as the inspira- 
tion of God. 

"Blessed art thou, Simon bar Jonah !" he cried, "Flesh and 
blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my Father in 
heaven." 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 187 

From this moment all hesitation ceases, Jesus adopts the 
current conception of the Messiahship. His mission is not 
to the Gentiles but the Jews. He is to restore the kingdom 
to Israel. His work lies not out yonder in the world ; he 
must set his face toward Jerusalem. David's throne must be 
set up in David's city. 

Under this new impulse Jesus loses his simplicity. He is 
moody; he walks apart from his following; they dare not 
speak to him. They have proclaimed him their king; they 
fall naturally into the rank of subjects. 

The word spreads throughout Galilee that the Messiah has 
come, and is on his way to Jerusalem. The whole country- 
side is aflame with excitement ; multitudes go before and 
follow after, crying : "Hosannah in the highest ! Blessed is he 
that cometh in the name of the Lord !" And Jesus enters 
Jerusalem in triumph as the Messiah of God. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 
Peter Denies Jesus 

And then nothing happens. Jesus falls back into his old 
method of teaching. Instead of proclaiming the kingdom 
and calling the people to arms, he is telling stories in the 
temple ; he is rousing the extreme anger of the priests and 
the scribes by his fierce denunciation of their vices; he is 
disappointing the people by his inaction, — and the inevitable 
end comes. 

The priests make ready to seize him ; the people forsake 
him. Jesus makes no effort to oppose his enemies, no effort 
to escape them. He comprehends now to the full his mis- 
sion : he is not to fight for the kingdom but to die for it. 
His earlier conception of the kingdom was the true one. 
The kingdom of God is within him. He cannot establish 
it by outward violence, only by inward obedience. 



188 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

This action of the Master is bewildering to his following, 
especially to Peter. Peter had come down to fight for the 
kingdom ; he had bought a sword. Had Jesus given the 

rd, Peter had been the first to raise the war-cry, "The 
sword of the Lord and Gideon !" and to have bathed his 
sword in the blood of the Gentiles. The Jewish authorities 
were not wrong in fearing at that time an uprising of the 
people. Had Jesus made the sign, Peter would have led 
the Galileans in an effort to overthrow the Roman power and 
reestablish the kingdom of Israel. 

But Jesus did not speak the word. Without an effort at 
defense or escape, he submitted to seizure. He was arrested, 
condemned, and executed. 

This unexpected turn of events changed the courage of 
r into panic fear. Instead of the excitement of the con- 
flict, be was paralyzed by the cold, benumbing, process of the 
He followed Jesus to the Hall of Annas, and there, 
when he was accused of being one of his company, he denied 
his leader, then denied him again and again. In an agony 
of shame and terror Peter turned and fled into the darkness, 
in the which we lose sight of him until the Sunday afternoon 
of the day of resurrection. 

From indications that we find in the narrative, from our 
knowledge of the character of Peter and of human nature in 
general, we may safely conclude that Peter hid himself in 
the crowd and followed Jesus to the Pretorium and to Cal- 
vary. He saw the scourging and the crowning with thorns, 
he heard the death sentence; he saw the nailing of the hands 
the feet, he watched from the third to the ninth hour; 
he heard the death-cry from the cross, and then in the des- 
ation of despair he turned and fled away into his own 
country, Galilee. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 189 

CHAPTER XXXIX 
Peter's Flight in Despair 

The life of Peter, from the time that he fled from the cross 
until his reappearance among the brethren in Jerusalem on 
the afternoon of the day of resurrection, has an importance 
in the religious life of mankind that can hardly be measured. 
During those wonderful hours that event transpired which 
made Peter the leader of the greatest religious movement in 
history. In reconstructing the life of Peter during this 
period, we shall have to make use of such hints as we can find 
in the records, which are few, assisted by our knowledge of 
the human soul and its workings under given conditions. 

The first impulse of Peter when assured of the death of 
Jesus was to escape from the horrors of his position and find 
refuge in his own country, Galilee. In obedience to this impulse 
he took the direct route homeward through Samaria. His 
actions were not those of a man who was conscious of what 
he was doing, but rather of one who was carried away by 
the subconscious forces within him. 

The soul of Peter throughout that journey homeward was 
the scene of a terrific psychic storm. Everything upon which 
his life rested was swept away. He had loved Jesus as one 
man seldom loves another, and Jesus was dead. No mother 
could mourn her firSt-born more despairingly than Peter 
mourned the loss of the youth whom his heart cherished. 
Not only had he been bereaved of his friend, he had also lost 
his leader. Peter had cast in his personal and political for- 
tunes with Jesus. He had forsaken father and mother, wife 
and children, his ways of livelihood, that he might further 
the plans of his Master, and now all those plans had come to 
naught ! It was not some little thing that he expected of 
Jesus ; it was nothing less than the restoration of the king- 
dom of Israel, — the deliverance of his country from the hated 
rule of the Gentile. And now this hope for the liberty of his 
people was blasted as by a stroke from heaven. Peter had 
proclaimed Jesus Messiah, he had made him, as it were, God 



190 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

in the earth, and this God had died the vile death of the 
criminal slave. Could wreck of faith and hope be more com- 
plete? From the devastated heart of Peter went up the 
desolating cry "There is no God, — there is no Saviour!" 

But beside this death of his friend, this blasting of his 
hopes, this dishonor of his God, a calamity had come upon 
Peter which mortal man seldom survives. In the wreck and 
ruin of the storm he had lost his own soul ; in the critical 
moment of his life his own spirit had failed him. In that 
moment Peter had basely denied his friend, had left his 
leader in the lurch, had lost his hold on God. He who 
thought himself brave had turned craven ; he had trembled 
at the word of a maid; he had hid himself in a crowd that 
had blasphemed his Ford ! All the horrors of that horrible 
time were swallowed up in the overwhelming horror that 
Peter had denied Jesus, — denied him again and again, denied 
him with an oath. And this action was beyond repair. Jesus 
was dead and could never know the shame, the sorrow, the 
bitter repentance of his recreant friend. 

So this bereaved, disappointed, abased man went on and 
on through the darkness, losing in his sorrow and remorse 
all sense of fatigue, and the early morning light found him 
in the denies of Gilboa, thirty miles and more from the scene 
of his disaster. As he came over the shoulder of the moun- 
tain he saw his own country, Galilee, lying quiet under the 
dawning. He saw Mount Carmel and Lake Gennasaret ; he 
saw Capernaum and Bethsaida. That land which was sacred 
to the eyes of all Israel, the land of Elijah and Elisha, the 
land in which he had walked and talked with Jesus, was so 
peaceful in the morning light that the horrors from which 
Peter had fled seemed to him but a nightmare from which 
he had awakened to find himself safe in his own country. 
This peace of nature hushed the storm in the soul of Peter. 
He listened, and he heard the tinkling of the sheep bells; he 
looked, and he saw the shepherds driving their flocks to 
pasture. He went to some shepherd's hut, begged a morsel 
of bread and some goat's milk, to break his fast, and lay 
down on the ground and slept the deep sleep of exhaustion. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 191 

CHAPTER XL 

Peter's Return in Joy 

When Peter came to himself, the sun was past meridian. 
He came out of his sleep with a bound and looked about, 
amazed to find himself in Galilee. And then he remembered 
yesterday. What was he doing here in his own country, 
while Jesus lay dead in Jerusalem? Why was he in hiding 
while his brethren were in danger of their lives? His polt- 
roonery roused in Peter a great anger against himself. He 
shook himself fiercely, turned about, and set his feet in the 
way by the which he had come, to return to Jerusalem. 

On his return journey the soul of Peter was calm with the 
calmness of settled grief; his heart revived; he lived over 
again his life with Jesus. Every word that had fallen from 
the lips of the Master came into his remembrance with new 
and fuller meaning; every act of the Master gained new 
significance. He began to see a divine purpose in the death 
of Jesus. Jesus could not be a man of violence, he could 
not sow the tares of hatred in the world. His death was 
sacrificial ; it was a testimony to the truth ; an offering to 
God for the sins of the world. 

As Peter thought on these things his heart went out in one 
longing desire to see Jesus again. 
And he saw him. 

Before him, his eyes accustomed to the darkness, the Mas- 
ter walked, going toward Jerusalem. The heart of Peter stood 
still, he dared not cry out, he dared not rush forward and 
lay hold of the hand of the Lord ; but he followed after as 
the Master walked on before. 

Then Peter spake, and the Master listened. He poured 
out all his sorrow and remorse, all his hopes and fears in the 
Master's hearing, and the Master did not repulse him. Hour 
after hour these two went on in the way toward Jerusalem, — 
the Master going before, and Peter following after. When 
the morning began to break, they had come to the borders 



192 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

of the land of Judah, and Peter paused to rest and the Master 
also stool still, his form dimly fading in the growing light. 
Then Peter turned about and he saw the figure receding in 
the distance, as if Jesus were going back into Galilee. 

And Peter made haste, flying on the wings of joy, and came, 
breathless, into the company of the disciples in Jerusalem, 
bringing the glad tidings that Jesus had risen from the dead., 
that he had walked and talked with him through the night, 
and that now Jesus had gone back into Galilee. 



CHAPTER X LI 

Psychic Projection 

The process by which Peter had seen Jesus is known to 
psychology as psychic projection. In limes of cerebral ex- 
citement, when the objective mind is in al e, the psychic 
force projects th of the subjective mind on the lenses 
of the eye, and the man sees what he thinks. He expresses 
his thought to himself, not in words but in visions. This ex- 
pressing of thought in vision is a reversion to primitive habit. 

Ages and ages before man had evolved language and could 
think in words he thought in vision. He saw with his mind's 
eye what his mind conceived. That hard boundary 

between the outward and the inward, between the physi 
and the psychic, which limits the thinking of the modem 
educated man, did not hold in the primitive age; it does not 
hold now with children nor with any one in sleep or in de- 
lirium. In our sleep, when our evolved objective mind is 
quiescent, we revert to primitive custom and think in visions. 
Our vision is purely psychic, having no relation at the time 
with our physical senses. The grown-up educated man has 
become so habituated to think in words that he has largely 
lost the power to think in visions. The artist retains that 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 193 

power: the painter sees with the inward eye; the musician 
hears with the inward ear, the deaf Beethoven heard in his 
soul his own divine harmonies. 

The mass of early Christians were primitive people. Peter's 
power of verbal expression was most meager. It was per- 
fectly natural for him to think in visions, and when he came 
to the little band of brethren he found them of the same mind 
with himself. He had but to suggest and they would follow 
his suggestion. They were apt subjects for psychical con- 
tagion. 

We can readily understand that Peter took the eleven 
apostles and hastened with them back into Galilee. And 
there at a certain mountain they all saw Jesus. Then Jesus 
began to appear first to one and then to another, until the 
fact of his resurrection crystallized into a belief, to be later 
formulated into a doctrine. 

It is psychologically significant that in the manifestation 
of Jesus to Paul, Paul did not see Jesus, — he only heard him. 
Paul was an educated man, his power to think in vision was 
limited. Paul had never seen Jesus in the flesh, hence he 
could not see him in vision, for the subjective mind can only 
project images which have been impressed upon it by the 
senses. 

Psychic projection is recurrent. The last appearance of 
Jesus to Peter, Christian tradition tells us, occurred just be- 
fore Peter's death. The Apostle was in Rome ; a persecution 
was raging; his fellow-Christians besought him to leave the 
city; he consented, and as he went out of the gate he saw 
Jesus coming in. Peter said to Jesus: "Douunc, quo vadis?" 
(Lord, whither goest thou?) "To be crucified in thy room," 
was the answer, and Peter turned about and went back into 
the city and was crucified, at his own request, with his head 
downward. 

The appearance of Jesus to Mary in the garden was due to 
the well-established fact that at the hour of death and for 
some limited time afterward the soul departing has the power 
to make its presence known to receptive spirits ; the apparitions 
of the dying or dead to the living are the commonplaces of 



t 



194 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

psychical research. Myers, in "Human Personality," gives in- 
stance after instance of such apparitions. They are too many 
and too well authenticated to be put down as mere mistakes 
or frauds. 

That the apostles and the primitive church did not attach 
much importance to these appearances to Mary we have al- 
ready learned ; but they were seized upon by the Christian 
imagination, and became the fruitful source of myth and leg- 
end. 

The doctrine and the discipline of the church have their 
origin in the vision of Peter. The worship and the art of the 
church are derived from the vision of Mary. These two 
streams of tradition have come down side by side, each main- 
taining its distinct character, — each watering a different region 
of Christian thought and feeling. 



CHAPTER XLII 
The Resurrection of the Dead 

The easy acceptance of the witness of Peter and Mary to 
the resurrection of Jesus arises from the fact that this event 
was in accord with the mode of thought prevailing at the 
time. Our conception of the universe was not the concep- 
tion of Peter's generation. Our universe, — with its infinite 
space, its myriad suns, its bewildering worlds, its eternal en- 
durance, — had no place in their thoughts. Their universe 
was limited by their knowledge. The earth, the home of 
living men, was the center of this universe; in the sky the 
gods had their thrones ; in the earth the dead rested. 

The dead of the ancient world were not nearly so dead as 
are the dead of the modern world. Our dead are huddled 
away in cemeteries and are soon forgotten. The ancient dead, 
after the evolution of the family, never lost their place in the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 195 

family circle. Their existence continued in the tomb, they 
were the guardians of the family life and the family estate. 

At times the dead came out of the tomb to warn the living. 
Psychic projection, by means of which the dead were seen 
by the living, was of constant occurrence in the primitive 
world. And this gave rise to a belief in a resurrection of the 
dead, — when all that were in their graves should come forth 
and stand up once more on the earth. When Peter saw 
Jesus he said : "This is the resurrection. He who was dead 
has risen, he has overcome death." 

By those who have little experience in psychic phenomena, 
who do not live in the psychic world, who are unacquainted 
with its laws, to whom the physical only is real, it will be 
objected that the writer has based the mighty event of the 
resurrection on a delusion. Peter was deluded when he 
thought he saw Jesus walking before him on the way to 
Jerusalem, and the delusion of Peter has been the abiding 
delusion of the Christian Church. 

The answer to this objection is that Peter, when he saw 
Jesus, was under the power not of a delusion but of an illu- 
sion. A delusion is the negation of truth ; an illusion is truth 
seen in relation. Throughout our lives we are under the 
power of an illusion. When in the morning we say: "The 
sun is rising," when in the evening we say: "The sun has 
set," we are under illusion. From science we learn that 
the sun, as a matter of fact, never rises and never sets, that 
it is we who rise and set as our revolving earth carries us 
above and below the line of the sun's light. Yet w r e do not 
err when we say the sun rises and sets ; w r e only express a re- 
lative truth. For us the sun does rise and set, and it al- 
ways will so long as man is on the earth and the sun is in 
the heavens. 

Likewise, Peter, when he saw Jesus walking before him on 
the way to Jerusalem, was under the power not of a delusion 
but of an illusion. Jesus was, indeed, not walking in a physi- 
cal body in the physical world ; but he was walking in a 
psychical body through the psychical world. He had risen 



196 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

from the dead to stand erect in the heart of Peter to wield a 
power mightier than physical man can exercise. 

Jesus' walk with Peter did not end at Jerusalem. Those 
two went together until they came to Rome, and there Peter, 
in the name and power of Jesus, laid the foundations of a new 
dominion which, built on the ruins of the empire of the 
Caesars, saved Europe from utter anarchy, preserved ancient 
learning, and for ten centuries, in the name of Christ, ruled 
the Western world in the interests of morality, religion, and 
personal salvation. It was as Jesus said : Men could kill the 
body, they could not kill the soul of Jesus. 

We have a like instance of resurrection in the case of 
Caesar. Brutus, Cassius, and their crew thought they had 
killed Caesar at the foot of Pompey's pillar, and so they had 
killed the body of Caesar, but they could not kill the soul of 
Caesar. The sun had not set that day before the soul of 
Caesar rose i I went marching through the streets of 

Rome, followed by an army of men with torches in their 
hands to burn the houses of those murderers over their heads, 
and to drive them from the city never to return. 

The soul of Caesar had risen from the dead to stand up in 
the psychic life of Rome, to carry to its issue the revolution 
that the genius of Caesar had inaugurated. lie followed up 
the victories of Pharsalus and Thapsus with the victories of 
Phillipi and Actium, and m de the name of Caesar synony- 
mous with efficient government for all time. Whenever a 
new emperor came to the throne, the people worshipped and 
said: "It is Caesar come again.'' 

We have had in our own history a remarkable example of 
psychic resurrection. At the outbreak of the Civil War it was 
declared by Lincoln and others that the Federal authorities 
had no intention to wage war against slavery ; the purpose 
of the war was not to destroy slavery but to preserve the 
Union. But both North and South had to reckon with a 
grim old warrior, whom the slave power a few months be- 
fore had hanged on Charlestown Green, who rose up from 
the dead to take moral leadership of the hosts of freedom. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 197 

A Massachusetts regiment on the way to the front marched 
through Washington singing the song of John Brown, — a 
song of few words and simple music. Nobody had written 
the words, nobody had composed the music. They were 
nothing less than the words and music of rugged old John 
Brown himself, who had died to bring this war to pass, who 
now rose from the dead and inspired with his purpose the 
hearts of the soldiers who sang- this song as they went on to 
battle ; and in the sound of it was the doom of slavery. John 
Brown's soul could have no peace until slavery was des- 
troyed. The great Lincoln himself was obedient to the 
spirit of Brown and shares with Brown the greatness and 
glory of that period. 

We have now arrived at the point where we can define a 
resurrected person as one who, having lived and died physi- 
cally for truth and righteousness, rises psychically from the 
dead and stands up in the power of his resurrection in the 
hearts of men, to inspire them with nobler thoughts, to in- 
cite them to braver actions. 

Such was the resurrection of Jesus. Its perplexities arise 
from the necessary confusion of psychic with physical phe- 
nomena on the part of the primitive church, and its present 
power is restrained by the crystallization of psychic phe- 
nomena as physical by the creed of the later church. Consid- 
ered as a physical phenomenon, the resurrection of Jesus is 
not only improbable, it is impossible, it is absurd, — it is 
grotesque. Considered as a psychic phenomenon, the resur- 
rection of Jesus falls into the natural order of the universe. 
What we call death is not the destruction, it is the release of 
psychic force. Personality is persistent and diffusive. What 
Emerson calls the "Oversoul" is simply the accumulated- liv- 
ing force of all-souls. The psychic force of Jesus, which is 
his personality and which was not subject to death, rose up 
in the heart of Peter, and Peter brought him to Rome. 



198 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XLIII 

Christus, The War God of the Spiritual Israel 

After his conversion and baptism by John, followed by a 
brief retirement in the wilderness, Jesus entered upon a 
career of conquest than which there has been none like it 
in all the history of the world. In comparison with the con- 
quests of Jesus the conquests of Caesar, both in time and 
space, are of the second order. Caesar laid the foundations 
of an empire that lasted for five hundred years. Around 
Jesus crystallized a government that endured for ten cen- 
turies as the ruling power of the Western world, and though 
long since betrayed from within it has resisted the assaults 
of time for ten centuries more. Caesar arrested the decay of 
an old and dying civilization. Jesus gave birth to a new and 
expanding civilization which is called after his name. This 
war of conquest which was inaugurated by Jesus ben Joseph 
in the days of his flesh was carried to a successful issue by 
Christus, the son of Jehovah, the War God of the spiritual 
Israel. In the conduct of this warfare, the son was like the 
father, — fierce as the desert, implacable as the mountain. He 
declared war against the enemies of his people from genera- 
tion to generation. 

The purpose of this warfare was nothing less than the de- 
struction of one world and the creation of another. After his 
sojourn in the desert, Jesus returned to his own city of 
Nazareth in Galilee. On the Sabbath he went to the syna- 
gogue, and the ruler of the synagogue asked him to read a 
scripture for the day. The young man was given the scroll 
of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book and found 
the place where it was written : 

i 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me 

Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. 

He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives ; 

And the recovering of sight to the blind ; 

To set at liberty them that are bruised, 

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 199 

And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat 
down ; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fastened on him, 
and he began to say unto them: "To-day hath this scripture been ful- 
filled in your ears." And all bear him witness and wondered at the 
gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said: 
"Is not this Joseph's son?" And Jesus went on to say: "But I tell you 
of a truth many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah when the 
heavens were shut up for three years and six months when great famine 
was throughout all the land, but unto none of them was Elijah sent 
save unto Serepta, a City of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. 
And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha, the prophet, and 
none of them were cleansed save Naaman, the Syrian." And all they 
in the synagogue when they heard these things were filled with wrath. 
And rose up and thrust him out of the City and led him unto the brow 
of the hill, whereon their City was built, that they might cast him down 
headlong. But, he, passing through them, went his way. 

In this bit of history we have the account of the opening 
engagement of a warfare that filled the world with its tumult 
for three hundred years. As we read these words we can see 
in them nothing that should have roused the wrath of the 
people and put the speaker in danger of his life. They seem 
to us innocuous words. We have heard them a thousand 
times and they have never stirred the pulses of our hearts. 
That is, however, because we hear the words and do not un- 
derstand the thought behind the words. 

When Bonaparte took command of the Army of Italy, 
which was the beginning of his astounding career, he issued 
a proclamation to his army. He said : "Soldiers, you are 
hungry and ragged and without pay. The government owes 
you much, but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your 
courage, do you honor but give you no glory, no advantage. 
I will lead you into the most fertile plains of the world. 
There you will find great towns, rich provinces. There you 
will find honor, glory, and riches. Soldiers of Italy, will 
you be wanting in courage?" 

Professor Seeley tells us that in this proclamation of the 
young Corsican was the spirit and the explanation of the 
history of Europe for the next twenty years. 



200 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

So I find in the sermon of Jesus, in the synagogue of 

Nazareth, the spirit and the history of the world for the next 
ten centuries. By that proclamation he cailed the poor of the 
earth to engage in an implacable warfare to abolish their 
poverty, he called the slaves of the earth to an irrepressible 
conflict for freedom, he stirred the heart of the prisoner to 
break the bais of his prison house, he proclaimed to the 
landless their right to take possession of the land, to the 
debtor he promised deliverance from and to the creditor the 
loss of the debt. And as if this were not enough, this young 
man had the audacity to strike a blow at the precious spe- 
cial privilege of the Jew to call himself, and to be, the chosen 
and only people of the God, Jehovah. 

Surely here was cause enough for terror and wrath. This 
young man said captives taken in war must not be enslaved 
by their captors. The slave was the equal of his master and 
entitled to the free I his master. What a horrible doc- 

trine! How subversive of society! Who would go to war if 
he could not make si of the vanquished? Was this young 

man wiser than Moses who h /en the captive women and 

children as slaves to the ? Over the hill with such a 

fellow; he is not lit to live! He is going to unchain our 
prisoners in our dungeons and turn those criminals loose to 
prey upon our . and endanger our lives. Away with 

him to the dungeon, to consort with the wretches whom he 
loves ! 

He. proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord. He would 
revive that obsolete, impractical law of Moses, which cancels 
all debts and redistributes all land once every fifty years. 
Moses' law was bad enough, but this insane fellow tells us 
that he is not going to do this fool thing once every fifty 
years, but once every day. Did you ever hear anything so 
crazy as that? Away with him! — he would abolish the sacred 

'its of propei ty in the interests of a lot of m ie pan. 

who haven't sense h to know the chance when 

they see it. with him ! Kill him, and throw his carcass 

to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air ! 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 201 

And as if this were not enoueh, he tells us out of our own 
books that our God, Jehovah, loves a Sidonian and a Syrian 
as well as, if not better, than he loves the child of His own 
son Israel. Who can listen to such blasphemy? Seize the 
traitor, drag him through the streets and throw him down on 
the rocks, crush every bone in his body and leave him there 
that the dogs may come and lick up his blood. 

These were the thoughts and the feelings roused in the 
hearts of his hearers as this young man, Jesus ben Joseph, 
in his native city, declared war for the abolition of slavery 
and of poverty; for the cancellation of debts and the redis- 
tribution of the land ; for the suppression of special privilege 
and the exaltation of the poor to an equality with the rich. 
Such doctrines necessarily excite contention and made war to 
the death inevitable. 

The method of warfare adopted by this young general was 
not less remarkable than was the purpose of his warfare. He 
did not deluge the earth with the blood of his enemies, but he 
made it red with the blood of his friends. His first great vic- 
tory was won when he himself was seized in the night, bound 
in the morning, stript naked at noon, and nailed to the 
cross and left in his agony to die in his pain and his shame at 
eventide. His enemies stood and watched him, washing: 
their heads and saying: "Let him come down from the cross/' 

And he did come down from the cross in the night, tri- 
umphant over death, — a warrior that need not be ashamed. 
With the breastplate of righteousness as his defense, with 
the girdle of truth as his strength, with the sword of the 
spirit as his weapon, and his feet shod with the preparation 
of the Gospel of peace, this War God went out before his 
people in the most singular warfare ever waged by man 
against man. 

In this warfare men conquered by defeat and lived by dy- 
ing. Christus, the War God of spiritual Israel, was taller 
than Saul and fairer than David. His crown was of thorns 
that blossomed with roses of blood. He was the bridegroom 
of a spouse of whom when they saw her, men said : "Who is 
she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the noon, clear 



202 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" Rank 
after rank his soldiers came and died, — in the sands of the 
arena, on crosses on the hill-tops, by rack and by fire, — and 
for every man that died ten men stepped up to take his 
place. 

For three centuries there was in the heart of the Empire 
of Rome a people whom the terrors of the Empire could not 
frighten. The tactics of Jesus ben Joseph, Christus, son of 
Jehovah, Generalissimo of the armies of the Lord, outwitted 
the strategy of Imperial Caesars, and the Labarum was low- 
ered to the Cross. 

The Working-Class God had driven the gods of the leisure 
class out of their temples and appropriated these temples to 
his own uses as the spoils of war. 

The triumph of primitive Christianity in the Graeco-Roman 
world was the triumph of moral over physical force. 



CHAPTER XLIV 
Christus, The Tent God of the Spiritual Israel 

The Christian religion in its beginning was, — and indeed, is 
now, so far as it is essentially Christian, — only a variation of 
Judaism. At the first it differed from orthodox Judaism only 
in the belief that Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, whom the 
rulers of Israel had crucified and slain, was both Lord and 
Christ. When Peter and John and the other disciples of 
Jesus met in an upper room after his death they did nothing 
more than organize another synagogue, of which there were 
hundreds in Jerusalem and the various cities of Judea, Galilee, 
and the world of Judaism outside the Holy Land. 

If these men had been told that they were founding a new 
institution which would become the rival and the enemy of 
the synagogue in every land, they would have cast away 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 203 

such a purpose as far from their intention and hateful to 
their loyalty as sons of Israel. They would have said, and 
did say: 

"Not so, we are the true Israel holding fast to the tradi- 
tions of the fathers, fervent in the hope and expectation of all 
the people of the Tews that our God Jehovah will come and 
deliver his people Israel. This hope for us has become a 
certainty ; we have seen the Lord's Christ. He has taught 
us on the hillside, walked with us by the way. healed our sick- 
ness, and turned our sorrow into joy. You. not knowing who 
he was. killed him, but Jehovah gave him back to us from 
the dead : he is alive in our midst, and from his hiding-place 
in the heavens is coming with glory to restore the kingdom 
to Israel and to bring the nations into subjection to the Lord 
and his Christ." 

When in the City of Antioch, and other Gentile cities, the 
Christian congregation dropped the Jewish word synago< 
and adopted the Greek word Ecclcsij as the name of its or- 
ganization, it did not change essentially the principles or the 
purposes of that organization- When the Church separated 
from the synagogue it robbed the synagogue of its god and 
its sacred books ; the traditions of the svna^o^ue became the 
traditions of the Church. 

The organization of the Christian community in the primi- 
tive church was nothing else than a reversion to the tribal 
organization oi the Children of Israel in the days when they 
wandered in the desert of Zin. Christians called each other 
brothers, not in the narrow sense of the agnatic family, but 
in the broader meaning of the tribal organization. In tribal 
Israel the minor fatherhood of the head of a given family 
was subordinate to the tribal fatherhood of Abraham. Wher- 
ever a Jew meets a Jew he is conscious of this tie of kindred. 
Though the one may be poor and the other rich, though one 
is a cultured German and the other an ignorant Pole, the 
sense of a common origin is strong enough to compel the 
rich and the cultured to recognize his brother Jew in the 
poor and the ignorant. But what is now a feeble emotion 
was in the days of tribal organization an overmastering pas- 



2U4 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

sion. When Israel was in the desert her elders were fathers 
in Israel and her voun" - men brothers in Israel. 

This form of organization was adopted by the early Chris- 
tian Church. Brotherhood was based, not as with us, on 
family relationship, but upon community relationship. The 
Christian neophyte entering the church was, in the thought 
and language of the church, born into a new life with its new 
relationships. The new-born Christian, by the fact of his 
birth, was a member of the household of God, with all the 
privileges to which his birth entitled him. When he came 
to the full consciousness of his new life, he found himself 
surrounded by elder brothers and sisters, able and willing to 
help him in his struggle for life. There was a roof over his 
head to protect him from the elements and a table spread at 
which he had the right to sit and eat and drink. 

All this is the commonplace „of Christianity; it is on the 
lips of the preacher every Sunday and holy day, but what 
is now a formula was once a fact. The progress of Chris- 
tianity was accelerated by the practice of Christianity ; when 
the Christian movement was in the freshness and the rush 
of its youth, this principle of tribal brotherhood came with 
healing to a world in which, for the mass of the people, the 
prevailing relation was that of master and slave. In such 
a relation there can be no feeling of mutuality. The master 
and the slave are creatures of worlds as different as the 
world of the man and the ox. The man drives the ox to 
labor in the morning and kills him for meat in the evening, 
and so it was with the slaves and the lower working class in 
the Grseco-Roman world, they were simply meat for their 
masters. 

When a master became a Christian he found himself re- 
duced to the equality of the slave. He and his slaves were 
brothers in this household of God. The bishop, who re- 
ceived him into the church, might be, and frequently was, 
a slave. The slave, degraded and outraged in his manhood, 
found himself a free man in the tribal life of this Israel of 
God. He sat at the same table with the master, ate of the 
same bread and drank of the same cup. The rapid increase 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 205 

of the Christian community in its earlier period was owing 
to the assimilation of the slave population. The church did 
not attempt to abolish slavery as a political institution of the 
empire, but it made slavery impossible within the confines 
of the church. It did not have one church for slaves and 
another church for free men, as was the custom in our South- 
ern States in the days of Negro slavery, but it incorporated 
into its membership with equal alacrity and equal indiffer- 
ence the master and the slave. Within the organization it 
compelled the master to recognize the humanity of the slaves 
and the slave the humanity of the masters. It is said : "Sirs, 
ye are brothers, ye cannot wrong one another." 

In the tribal form of organization the women were far 
more the equals of the men than they were in the later agnatic 
family and political organizations. When the tribe is on the 
march the women must walk side by side with the men, they 
must share in the labors, and have a place in the councils of 
the camp. They cannot be secluded from the common life ; 
their only restriction is that they stay in the camp while the 
men go out to battle but this restriction is swept away when 
the battle is in the camp ; then the women fight hand to hand 
with more than the fierceness of men in defence of their young- 
The tribal form of organization gave great liberty to women 
in the early Christian movement. This religion recognized 
the personality of woman and made her in her own right a 
partaker in the common salvation. From the first this re- 
ligion had a great attraction for women. When Paul 
preached, we are told, such and such men were converted 
and "devout women not a few." 

The woman never became a bishop in the church nor did 
she occupy the seat of the elder, but she had official recogni- 
tion as co-worker in the administration of the affairs of the 
church with the bishop and elder. In the warfare of the 
church the woman held the first rank in the army of martyrs. 
It was the women, even more than the men, who, by their 
fearless confession and their dauntless death, made possible 
the victory of the church. The recognition of the personality 
of the woman came as a gift of God to the slave women of 



206 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the Roman world ; when such a woman came into the Chris- 
tian church it did not matter that her body had been out- 
raged by her master; if she had not consented to the outrage 
and in the inner shrine of her soul desired purity, then she 
was pure, pure as the proudest matron who took her in her 
arms and called her sister. 

In the tribal organization private property is of little con- 
sequence. An army on the march has a common commis- 
sarat, the officers and the men sleep on the ground and eat 
the army rations. When the tribe is moving, its baggage is 
light, the chief and the tribesman are upon a near equality. 
The one cannot live in luxury while the other is starving, for 
that is fatal to the tribal life. The only privilege that the 
chief has over the tribal man is that he may and must go 
before the tribal man in the battle ; he has the right to leader- 
ship ; it is his prerogative' to be the first to die. 

The early Christian movement was subject to these rules 
of the tribal life. The possessions of each were the possessions 
of all. Private property was subordinated to community 
need. In the days of its early enthusiasm, no Christian said 
"that aught of the things that he possessed were his own, 
but they held all things common." The church was not 
socialistic in the sense of modern socialism, because produc- 
tion was necessarily individualistic ; hand tools made of each 
man a hand worker, and anything like a socialization of the 
process or the product of labor was out of the question. 

Nor was the Christian society communistic in its early 
period. Communism is possible only when the community 
has common property in land. Early Christianity was the re- 
ligion of the city slave and artisan, these had no land to hold 
in common (that came later) ; their possessions were the 
pittance of the slave and the paltry wage of the free worker. 
It was the pooling of these that was the main source of the 
wealth of the church. There were "not many nobles, not 
many rich," we are told, in that body of men and women who 
professed and called themselves Christians. It was the pen- 
nies of the poor not the pounds of the rich that financed this 
army of the Lord. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 207 

There were no idlers in the camp to consume the product 
of the workers ; when a man became a Christian he did so 
at the risk of his life and only the energetic would make the 
great adventure. It was the business of the bishop to train 
the youth in industry and to watch over the morals of the 
young. In the course of its evolution the church elaborated 
a system of discipline that made idleness and wastefulness 
punishable by censure and exclusion from the common weal 
of the church. 

The communion of the saints was an article of the creed 
of primitive Christianity, and this did not mean, as in our 
day, communion only in the spiritual gifts of love and joy 
and peace in the Holy Ghost but also communion in the gifts 
of bread and wine and clothing and shelter. The Christian 
community was a community with community rights and not 
a mere aggregation of individuals. 

The people were unified by a common danger and a com- 
mon hope. They were living in a world which was to them 
a desert place in which there was neither bread nor water. 
The mass of the people in that ancient world were in a state 
of chronic starvation ; they never had enough to eat. One 
cannot read the early literature of Christianity without feel- 
ing the pangs of hunger. Like a famishing man in his dream, 
it dwells on great clusters of grapes and fabulous fields of 
wheat. Its tree of life bears twelve kinds of fruit every 
month. Its thought is to eat and to drink in the kingdom of 
God. When the day of God comes it will be to "fill the 
hungry with good things." 

Starvation and slavery were the haunting dread of human 
life to the millions who lived in the cities of the Roman Em- 
pire, in the days of the decline. It was this dread that drove 
men together in mutual benefit societies, that made the de- 
fenseless form leagues of defense. They were driven to- 
gether as the sheep on the wild are driven together by the 
storm, — that huddling close they may protect one another 
from its icy death. Christianity was the sheepfold giving 
shelter to these victims of the wind and the rain. It was 
the armed camp with its sentries guarding those within from 



208 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

foes without. It was the congregation of Christus, the Son 
of the Tent God of Israel, who had come at his Father's 
command to rescue his people and bring them out of the 
house of their bondage into the land of promise. All that 
ancient Israel had dreamed the Christian hoped to attain at 
the coming of Christus his god, and for that coming, with 
a faith that survived a thousand disappointments, he watched 
and waited even as they that watch for the morning. 

Blessed illusion ! While the Christian watched and waited, 
he made for himself the Kingdom of God that he longed for, 
a kingdom in which the slave was as free as the master, the 
woman the equal of the man ; wherein the strong were the 
protectors of the weak, and the rich became as the poor. That 
spiritual Jerusalem was as a city at unity with itself, and to 
it came the tribes of the $arth to worship Christus, the Son 
of Jehovah, the King and the Keeper of the City of God. 



CHAPTER XLV 

Christus, the Son of Jehovah the Righteous 

The persecution of the worshippers of Christus by the 
Roman Government, the hatred of his followers by the Roman 
populace, calls for explanation. As we know, the Roman 
Government was tolerant of all religions and hospitable to 
all gods, and with the people religious variety was the spice 
of life. The cult of every known god, except Christus, was 
cultivated in the City of Rome with impunity and ardor. 
The priests of Isis made the proudest matrons of Rome the 
victims of their lust; Heliogabalus, the sun god of Syria, 
made sodomites of the young men of the city. Every de- 
pravity which the corrupt imagination could conceive was 
freely practiced under the guise of religion with the connivance 
if not with the consent of the authorities. Only the God 
Christus was singled out for censure and his followers sub- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 209 

ject to punishment. What makes this the more strange is that 
these victims of Roman rage were an obscure, harmless folk : 
they were not fierce like the Jews, stirring up rebellion against 
the city, they were quiet and submissive and did not resent 
the greatest injuries; they were for the most part the off- 
scouring of the people, slaves and converted criminals- 
Pliny the Younger, writing of them to the Emperor Trajan, 
said : that the only facts which he could discover were that 
they had a custom of meeting together before daylight and 
singing a hymn to one Christus as God. They were bound 
together by no unlawful sacraments, but only under mutual 
obligation not to commit theft, adultery, robbery or fraud. 1 

It was such a people as this that the Roman Government 
pursued with relentless rigor for more than two centuries ; 
they were beaten with rods, imprisoned, beheaded, thrown 
to the lions, and burned at the stake. And this violence was 
not the consequence of sporadic outbreaks, but was the set- 
tled policy of the government. The vilest and the most 
virtuous of the emperors agreed in their detestation of the 
religion of Christus and put his followers to torture and 
death. Nero was no more bitter nor cruel in this respect 
than was Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius was as severe as 
Domitian. 

The priests of the various temples were not slow to in- 
flame the wrath of the rulers and to excite the fears of the 
populace. By imperial decree and popular tumult the fol- 
lowers of Christus, called Christians, were in constant dan- 
ger of death. 

And this was no mere madness on the part of the estab- 
lished authorities in religion and politics; the emperors and 
the pontiffs had reason to fear this new, strange god who had 
made his entrance so silently, so mysteriously into their 
city. This simple, harmless people who were called after 
his name were not so simple nor so harmless as they seemed. 
In the purlieus of the slave markets and in the outlying 
graveyards, wherever Christians met together, forces were 

1 Millman, "Christianity," vol. ii, p. 93: John Murray, London, 
1867. 



210 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

generated that were destructive of the system under which 
emperors and priests lived and ruled. All other gods that 
found refuge in Rome were submissive to Divus Caesar, the 
God of the Organization ; only the God Christus denied him. 
And it was this denial which was the all-sufficient crime 
calling for the extermination of this god and the destruction 
of his following. 

Christus denied the right of the Emperor to rule the peo- 
ple. His rule, founded as it was upon physical force, was 
an outrage to the soul of man. Christus made the soul of 
man a sovereignty ; each man was answerable only to his 
own soul, which was the seat of the living God. In the em- 
perors and the priests Christus saw not the benefactors but 
the oppressors of the people, who laid upon their shoulders 
heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, which these favor- 
ites of the existing system would not lift with one of their 
fingers. In the thought of Christus all rule of man over man 
was an outrage upon humanity. In his conception of gov- 
ernment rulership gave place to leadership and mastery to 
service. They who were great in the community were to be 
the servants of the community ; they were to occupy not the 
place of safety but the post of danger. 

Christus was horrified to see emperors housed in palaces 
while the people perished from the cold ; it was sacrilege that 
the rulers should riot in luxury while the people starved for 
want of bread. In the thought of Christus social forces or- 
ganized into government were divine, to be used only for the 
good of the people. The prostitution of these forces by the 
ruling class to gratify their lusts and their cruelties was to 
this god an unspeakable profanation ; the abomination of 
desolation in the Holy Place. Such rule founded upon force 
and not upon consent was as the rape of a woman, a deed 
of shame, destructive of love and life. To make such rule 
impossible in the earth was the fixed purpose of the God 
Christus. The emperors and the priests made no mistake in 
the war which they carried on from generation to generation 
against this god and his people. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 211 

Not only did Christus dispute their rule but he denied as 
well the validity of their laws. He, as the incarnate son of 
Jehovah The Righteous, opposed his righteousness to their 
legalities. According to Roman legalities one man could 
own another man as his private property and the master 
could and did live on the unrequited labor of the slave. If the 
slave ran away, the master pursued him with dogs, and if he 
resisted arrest, he was crucified ; the slave girl, if she resented 
the lust of her master, was strangled and thrown to the fishes. 
A world in which such horrors could happen was to Christus 
a lost world, — doomed to destruction. 

This legalized system of slavery could not and cannot sur- 
vive the heat of the wrath of a righteous god. The conten- 
tion of righteousness against legality will go on and must go 
on until legality becomes righteousness and righteousness 
legality. 

The laws of the land which give the land to the few to 
the exclusion of the many, which acknowledged legal owner- 
ship based upon title deeds, to the hurt of natural owner- 
ship based upon occupation and use, was iniquity in the 
sight of Christus, Son of Jehovah The Righteous. In his 
conception the ownership of land is in Jehovah, who holds 
it in trust for the people; the land is for the people and the 
people for the land. It was so in the days of Joshua, the son 
of Nun; it is so in the days of Jesus, the son of Joseph. 

To Christus it was a foul injustice that woman should be 
subject to a different moral standard from that observed by 
man, that she should be stoned for her adultery while he 
gloried in his sin. In the eyes of Christus woman was a soul 
as well as a sex. She, in the right of her soul, was entitled 
to her place side by side with man in all the affairs of life. 
If he were king, she was queen ; they were to sit side by side 
upon their thrones ruling their common domain. 

The God Christus was a revolutionary god, having in 
mind the overthrow of the pillars of ancient society, which 
were imperial rule, human slavery, private unlimited owner- 
ship of land, and the subjection of women. Christus decreed 
democracy, the freedom of the slave, the redemption of the 



212 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

land, and the emancipation of the woman ; and for these 
things he was hated and pursued to his death by the emperors 
and the masters of the slaves, the lands, and the women of the 
ancient world. 

And besides all this, Christus was the sworn enemy of all 
priesthoods. The temples with their sacrifices of bulls and 
goats were an abomination to him, the priests with their dron- 
ing prayers were to him as fools making merchandise of their 
own folly. What they called the service of God was in the 
eyes of Christus the service of evil. The substance of the 
people was taken to build houses for the gods which the gods 
could not live in and the meat of the people was brought to the 
table of the priest where the gods could not eat. The whole 
system of religion, Jew and Gentile, as it existed in his day 
was to him nothing but A a contrivance by which the priests 
exploited the people ; and this was the all-sufficient reason 
why the priests hated Christus and Christus hated the priests. 
He was the son of that God who did not live in temples made 
with hands, who did not eat bull's flesh nor drink the blood of 
goats, who did not require that his people should tread his 
courts. What he asked of them was that they should judge the 
fatherless and plead the cause of the widow; that they should 
feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit 
the sick, comfort the prisoner, do justly, love mercy, and walk 
humbly with their God, who was a Spirit to be worshipped in 
spirit and in truth. 

Such doctrine could not but make the ancient world afraid, 
for it meant the destruction of that legalized kingdom of 
man's making, that it might give place to the righteous king- 
dom of God's creating. The antagonism between Christus 
and the Roman Caesar was the natural consequence of antag- 
onistic ideals. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 213 

CHAPTER XLVI 

Christus, the Son of the Holy One of Israel 

That wonderful institution, the Christian church, came into 
being to preserve men and women from the depravity of the 
world. In the thought of the followers of the god Christus 
the Grseco-Roman civilization in the midst of which they 
lived was not only terribly unjust, it was also horribly un- 
clean. This uncleanness was not such that it could be washed 
away in the bath, it must be purified by fire. This sense of 
physical and moral impurity was not a creation of the Chris- 
tian movement, it was an efficient cause of the success of that 
movement. The feeling of uncleanness made the whole world 
miserable. In spite of the public baths and the abundant pri- 
vate baths in the homes of the wealthy, the ancient city, even 
more than the modern, was the haunt of physical impurity. 
The very conditions under which the mass of the people 
lived prevented cleanliness. 

The walled city of the ancient and medieval world was 
almost of necessity the breeding-place of physical vileness : 
the narrow streets, the ill-ventilated houses barred the sun- 
light and vitiated the air. The people, crowded into close 
quarters without adequate sanitary provision, were the vic- 
tims of vermin and contagious diseases. Plagues and fevers 
were the natural consequence of this unnatural mode of life, 
and men and women died of them by the hundreds and the 
thousands year by year. Our modern cities, bad as they are, 
are a paradise of cleanliness when compared with the ancient 
and medieval city. Diseases common in those cities are al- 
most unknown to us. As we go out of our city into the sur- 
rounding country we never hear the leper's bell nor the 
leper's warning cry; "Unclean, unclean!" 

The low estate of medical knowledge gave to this un- 
cleanness a power and a horror of which, happily, we know 
nothing. Remedies viler than the sickness were prescribed 
by physicians whose ignorance was only equaled by their 



214 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

cupidity. Philters were concocted, charms were devised, to 
the delusion of the sick man. The priests were not back- 
ward with their prayers and incantations to drive the devils 
out of the tortured body. Sickness was ascribed to the pres- 
ence of a foul fiend, the expulsion of which was necessary to 
a cure. Venereal and nervous afflictions made their victims 
blind and crazy, and as these poor creatures were not cared 
for by the state, being for the most part slaves, they made 
the streets and the highways pestilent with their beggary 
and their shamelessness. 

Civilization has always been unclean ; humanity crowded 
in cities creates the foulness that destroys it. A pig running 
at large in the forest is as clean an animal as one would wish 
to see, a pig in a pen is filthy; but the pig is not to blame 
for that filthiness, — it is the pen. 

Not only was the ancient city physically unclean, it was 
morally vile as well. Abuse of the appetites was prevalent 
and destructive of all that made human life decent and toler- 
able. The existence in every city of a large slave population, 
living in promiscuity and yielding themselves without resist- 
ance to the vicious desires of their masters, made possible a 
condition of moral depravity such as we at present cannot so 
much as comprehend. Our cities are bad enough, but in 
gluttony, in drunkenness, and in lechery, such cities as Rome 
and Antioch in the days of their decay were to our cities as 
hell to heaven. In one respect they may have been better 
than we ; they were not hypocrites, hiding their shame be- 
hind a curtain of sanctimoniousness: what they did they did 
in the open, and their shame was their glory. We have in 
the "Satires" of Juvenal, in the "Poems" of Ovid, in the "His- 
tory" of Suetonius and the "Annals" of Tacitus, ample evi- 
dence of a moral condition sufficient to turn the heart of a 
decent man cold with loathing, and to make the world an unfit 
place for a decent woman to live in. 

It was this physical and moral uncleanness that gave to the 
Christian movement that principle of separation which made 
of its people a peculiar people, living apart, hating and hated 
by the world from which they had withdrawn. The antag- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 215 

onism of the church and the world which is written on every 
page of history, sacred and profane, since the advent of Chris- 
tianity, was the necessary outcome of that conception of sin 
and holiness which possessed the mind of the primitive world. 

Ignorant of the natural causes of sickness and moral de- 
pravity, the primitive mind ascribed these evils to the direct 
action of the gods. It was from the gods that the sickness 
came, it was to the gods that the sick must look for deliver- 
ance. The anger of the gods was aroused by the neglect of 
men. If man did not worship the gods aright, the gods visited 
them with the plague and the pestilence. Each god had his 
own particular province in which he gave expression to his 
good will and his anger. The domestic gods were the keepers 
of domestic virtue ; they punished the adultery of the wife and 
the disobedience of the children by causing the heir of the 
house to die of the plague. When the Pater-familias was at 
odds with the gods they cursed his cattle with barrenness and 
beat down his harvest with the hail. The neglect of the city 
gods was avenged by the pestilence and the abandonment of 
the city to its foes. It was the sin of Israel against the god 
of Israel that was the cause of the calamities of Israel. 

So there arose in the heart of man that sense of sin as 
separating between him and his god which, for good and for 
evil, has played so great a part in his spiritual life. In this 
way the primitive mind ascribed physical illness to spiritual 
agencies and looked upon the physical creation itself as es- 
sentially unclean and the cause of uncleanness in the soul of 
man. The sin of the world was the destruction of the world ; 
only by escaping from the world could the soul be delivered 
from the damnation under which the world rested. 

Because of this, the followers of the God Christus were 
called upon to forsake the world that they might become a 
holy people acceptable to the Lord. 

This quality of holiness, which was one of the essentials 
of the early Christian movement, gave to it a power which 
no other propaganda at the time possessed. Its cry to the 
people was : "Come, wash and be clean !" Its initiatory cere- 



216 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

mony was a bath; it offered cleanliness as a free gift; the 
only pre-requisite was the desire to be clean. "Come, wash 
you and make you clean!" was a welcome invitation to souls 
and bodies soiled and sick of the soil. 

Christus was a clean god ; he was not city-born, he came 
from the country-side, washed in the dew of the morning 
and fragrant with the scent of the new-mown hay. Men 
saw in him the purity of the rain and the cleanness of the 
sunlight. 

His followers ascribed to this god an extravagant moral 
perfection ; they said he was a god without sin ; in him there 
was no guile, neither was sin found in his mouth. His sin- 
lessness was a miracle ; it was an attribute of his divinity. 
He did not sin, because he could not sin. In these claims 
the followers of Christus overshot the mark. They made 
of him a prodigy, they removed him out of the sphere of 
moral experience, they imperiled his humanity, — and a god 
without humanity is no god for man. 

For the time being this exaggeration served its purpose. 
Men worshipped sinlessness, they made moral cleanness a 
passion of the soul. In their eager reaction against the evil 
of their times, these worshippers of Christus went to a far 
extreme, they made appetite itself a sin. To eat and to 
drink and to love was an evil, displeasing to Christus and 
the occasion of death to the soul. To fast and to weep and 
to pray, to scourge the body in the interests of the spirit, be- 
came the ideal of the Christian life. 

The people were set to practice an impossible holiness 
which was sure to result in a vicious reaction. But so it is 
with this poor human nature of ours ; it swings from extreme 
to extreme and by so swinging it moves the hands of the 
clock of progress and brings the world little by little to the 
golden mean which Aristotle tells us, is the seat of virtue. 

The worship of Christus, — the Son of the Holy One, the 
One who is high and lifted up, who shares man's sorrows but 
not his sin, in whose eyes the stars are unclean,— was the 
inevitable reaction from the worship of the old nature gods 
by a depraved city people. The nature gods can be wor- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 217 

shipped with safety only in the midst of nature: the god of 
the sky under the sky, the god of the harvest in the fields 
of the harvests, the god of the vine where the grapes are in 
cluster, the god of fecundity where children are welcomed. 

These gods when carried into the city, lose their fresh- 
ness and their innocence ; they become corrupt and corrupt- 
ing. They change the desire for children into a lust for 
women, they make of eating gluttony, and of drinking drunk- 
enness. The farmer, after a hard day's work, can drink the 
pure wine of his own making and be glad of heart ; he can eat 
freely of the bread of his own baking and be satisfied, and 
beget sons and daughters and be the more vigorous for his 
lawful indulgence. But in the city, if he is rich and able, he 
will be tempted to eat for the sake of eating, to drink for the 
pleasure of drinking, and to love for the sensation of loving. 
His appetite will grow by that which it feeds upon until he 
becomes a glutton and a lecher. Country gods are for the 
country-side ; they are dangerous to the morals of the city- 
It is one of the marvels of religious history that Jesus ben 
Joseph, the man of the country-side, should have become the 
reforming god of the city. He, — who, in the days of his flesh, 
was a free liver, called by his enemies a gluttonous man and 
a wine-bibber, a friend of harlots and a companion of sin- 
ners, — became by a process of deification the god of the city 
ascetic, the god of the man who sought to save his soul by 
starving his body, and to maintain his purity by renouncing 
his manhood. 

Holiness at the best is a negative quality; it saves men 
and gods by secluding them. The moon is chaste because the 
moon is alone ; a saint on a pillar is a saint on a pillar. Jesus 
ben Joseph lost much of his power over humanity when as 
a god he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty of The 
Holy One of Israel. 



218 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER XLVII 
The Worship of Christus in the Primitive Church 

It came to pass one day in the month of August many- 
years ago that I was walking at noontide down the Via 
Appia, in the City of Rome. This once famous thoroughfare 
had long since ceased to be the resort of the people or the 
highway of traffic. 

In the days of Roman greatness the Via Appia was 
thronged with chariots carrying the Roman patrician to and 
from his villa in the country ; to and from his house in the 
city; fashionable women lolled in their litters, with their 
sandaled feet exposed to attract the eye of the Roman gal- 
lant; merchants with their wares, physicians with their 
philters, stood by the roadside calling to the people to buy; 
slaves bending under their burdens were carrying goods from 
Rome to Capua, and from Capua to Rome; gladiators were 
marching from the pens in the Campania to the Circus in the 
city. In the good old days one had but to stand on the road- 
side of the Via Appia to see all Rome pass by. 

But on that midday in August I saw nothing but a donkey- 
cart with a sleeping driver going slowly towards the Cam- 
pania and lizards running along the wall. It was as lonely, 
as desolate, and as dull under that noonday sun as it was 
wont to be thronged and alive and amusing twenty centuries 
before. 

Making my way past the tombs of the patricians which 
line the roads for miles out of Rome, I came to the church 
St. Sylvester, and with a guide entered the Catacombs. We 
followed the winding way of this subterranean burial place 
until we came to the Chapel of St. Sixtus, — a large chamber 
cut out of the volcanic rock as a place of worship for the 
Christian people in the days of their greatness. It was in 
these catacombs that the worshippers of Christus laid their 
dead, to await the coming of their God, — when the dead 
should hear his voice and live. These catacombs were the 
sleeping chambers of the saints until they should awake in 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 219 

the morning of their resurrection. Into these catacombs the 
living- came to meet their god. There was no difference be- 
tween the dead and the living in the thought of this people 
of Christus, only this: that the living were awake and the 
dead were sleeping in Jesus, the Christus of God. 

The living cut out from the rock the Chapel of St. Sixtus 
and the Chapel of St. Callixtus and set their altars there to 
offer upon them an unbloody sacrifice, — holy, acceptable to 
the Lord. It was with these passageways through the earth 
as it was with the Via Appia above, — once they had been 
crowded with Christians bringing their dead to burial, or 
coming with flowers to the tombs of their friends, and to 
worship in the chapels by the way. On that afternoon in 
August I was alone with the guide, not even a tourist dis- 
turbed the solitude of those chambers of the dead. 

As I stood in the Chapel of St. Sixtus in the Catacombs 
I thought of another chapel of another Sixtus in the Palace 
of the Vatican. The contrast was great, and we will bear 
that contrast in mind as we follow the progress of the God 
Christus from the days of his greatness in the Catacombs to 
the days of his decline in the Palace. 

Here at this little stone table in his chapel on, as it were, 
the 4th of August in the year 258 A. D., Sixtus II, bishop of 
Rome, was breaking bread for his people. Between him and 
the people there was no difference, except that he was the 
father and they his children. His dress was as the dress 
of a common man ; it would have been abomination on the 
lips to call him by the heathen title Pontifex Maximus, or 
His Holiness, or any other name except Father and Overseer 
or Bishop. He was a follower of Jesus the Christus, a mem- 
ber of the congregation of the saints, with no privilege above 
his brethren save the privilege to die for them. And that 
privilege he enjoyed that day. For as he stood at the table 
of the Lord breaking bread for the people of the Lord, the 
soldiers of the emperor Valerian came and took him away; 
and on the sixth day of August in that selfsame year, Sixtus 
II, Bishop of Rome, died under the hand of the executioner 
— a saint and a martyr of the church. 



220 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

As I stood in the chapel and recalled this event and studied 
the Christian memorials around me, I could not help seeing 
and feeling how entirely the Christus was the God of the 
Catacombs. His sacred symbols, the fish and the lamb, on 
every side ; his sacred sign of the cross sealed every door of 
every tomb ; the Greek letters of his monograph, — I.H.S., — 
which were interpreted by the Roman to mean Jesus Hominis 
Salvator, Jesus, the Saviour of Man. There was no sign 
of any other god to be seen other than the sign of the 
God Christus. The glory of the Father was lost in the 
nearer glory of the Son. Men might fear the Father, but 
they loved the Son. They loved him, for he was even such 
an one as themselves. He had been a working man as most 
of them were working men ; he had been of a despised and 
rejected race, even as they were a despised and rejected class, 
he had been oppressed and afflicted, even as they were op- 
pressed and afflicted ; he had rebelled against the injustice 
of the world, even as they were rebelling. Down in the 
Catacombs they were singing their revolutionary songs : "He 
shall put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the 
humble and weak." "He hath filled the hungry with good 
things and the rich he hath sent empty away/'* They were 
exhorting one another to watch and wait for His coming, 
when the powers of heaven should be shaken, when the sun 
should be darkened and the moon turned into blood, when 
the elements should melt with fervent heat and out of this 
burning, fiery furnace should walk Christus, the Son of Man, 
not a hair of his head singed, not the smell of smoke in his 
garments; who by the power of his word should out of the 
melting elements of that old world, drunk with the blood of 
the saints, mould a new world, informed with his righteous- 
ness and possessed by his people. 

It did not take long, standing there in the darkness, lighted 
by the torch of the monkish guide, to see that Christus was 
a great God in the clays of the Catacombs, — a God for whom 
men would forsake father and mother and wife and children 
and house and land ; a God for whom men would gladly and 
eagerly die; a God of whom men asked nothing but that he 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 221 

would wash them and make them clean; a God for whom 
a prince would forget his nobility and sit beside the beggar 
on the wayside; a God for whom a beggar would cast off his 
degradation and become rich with the unsearchable riches of 
Christus. This was a God to be reckoned with above all 
gods of the bed and the gate and the fire; he had a strength 
beyond the god of the sky and the earth and the water; he 
was more powerful than all the gods of the cities; mightier 
than Divus Caesar, the God of the Organization, for he was 
the god of the human heart, from which are the issues of 
life and death. 

Down there in the Catacombs, in burying places and caves 
of the earth throughout the Roman Empire was generated 
that love for and devotion to Christus as God, — a devotion 
that compelled the recognition of his divinity, made his church 
supreme for ten centuries in Europe, and gave his name to 
Western civilization. 

This worship of Jesus was not based in reason, it had its 
seat in the emotions ; it was, in this earlier period, but little 
troubled by theological subtleties. God the Father was to 
the devout Christian of the Catacombs but little more than 
the background of Christus the Son, and God the Spirit was 
nothing else than the Spirit of Christus abroad in the world. 

The religion of Christus was powerful because it was sim- 
ple. Believe on the Lord Jesus-Christus and be saved was 
its creed ; wash in the waters of baptism and be clean was its 
initiation ; eat of the bread, which is the body of Jesus and 
live with Jesus was its doctrine, A few simple facts were 
all that the Christian neophyte had to master before his 
discipleship. The birth, the death, the resurrection of Chris- 
tus was the heart of his religion. 

With this simple dogmatic the Church went to the lower 
orders of the Roman Empire and gave them a supreme object 
of enthusiasm, a philosophy of history that the most child- 
like could grasp, and an undying hope to keep them alive. 
To love Christus was the beginning of life; to go to Christus 
the end of life. 



222 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

And the worship of Christus was as simple as its doctrine. 
It consisted, as Justin Martyr tells us, of a few prayers, the 
reading and the explanation of the Memoirs of Christus, and 
the breaking of bread to the people in remembrance of the 
breaking of bread by the Master in the hour of his betrayal, — 
simply that and nothing more- No priests standing before 
the altars in chasuble, bedecked with embroidery and be- 
gemmed with jewels ; no great cathedral with vaulted roof, 
no music of Palestrina, sung by women and men and boys 
trained for the purpose. Only a plain man in the plain 
clothes of the people, standing before a table hewn out of the 
rock by the people themselves ; only the low room of the 
Catacombs, lighted by torches that the people carried ; only 
the songs of the revolutipn, sung by the people of the revolu- 
tion as they walked in and out and round about through all 
the turnings of the ways between their dead. 

And yet this great people were not without a wealth of 
their own, as was proved by St. Lawrence, the archdeacon 
of Sixtus II, Bishop of Rome, in whose chapel I was medi- 
tating. 

There I remembered that when the soldiers of Valerian 
came and took the bishop to his death they carried away the 
archdeacon also, as a prisoner, and brought him before the 
Pretorian Prefect of the City of Rome. Now the Prefect of 
the City knew that the archdeacon of the church was the 
keeper of the treasures of the church, and the Prefect said to 
the archdeacon: "Bring me the treasures of the Church and 
you shall live; refuse and you shall surely die." The arch- 
deacon answered: "Give me three days, my lord, and I will 
bring the riches of the church to your palace." The Prefect 
consented and the archdeacon went his way. The Prefect 
was glad, for he had heard that the church was very rich. 

When Lawrence, the archdeacon, left the Palace of the 
Prefect, he made haste and went to the house of the banker 
of the church, and asked the banker, saying: "How much 
money has the church in your keeping?" and the banker an- 
swered saying: "So much," and the archdeacon answered the 
banker saying: "Send so much to the Bishop of Vienne in 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 223 

Gaul, and so much to the Bishop of Toledo in Hispania, and 
so much to the Bishop of Carleon in Britain, and so much to 
the Bishop of Carthage in Africa, and give me the rest in 
three bags for myself." And the banker did as the arch- 
deacon had said, and when he had finished the archdeacon 
spake to the banker, saying: "Have you anything left of the 
treasures of the church?" And he answered and said: "Noth- 
ing." And the archdeacon made haste and went out into 
the city and found two deacons of the church and brought 
them to the bank and gave one bag of money to the one 
deacon and one bag of money to the other deacon and car- 
ried one bag of money himself. Then with a deacon on 
either hand the archdeacon Lawrence went down into the 
slums of the City of Rome, in and out its sordid streets, up 
and down the rickety steps of the rickety tenements, knock- 
ing at the door of the blind Mopsuestia, giving her of the 
money of the church and saying: "Be in the square of the 
palace of the Pretorian Prefect at such an hour and on such 
a day." So from door to door, with his deacons beside him, 
the archdeacon went, giving of the treasure of the church to 
the halt and the lame and the aged, until all the money was 
gone, saying to each as he gave: "Be in the square of the 
palace of the Pretorian Prefect at such an hour and on such 
a day." 

When the day and hour arrived the archdeacon stood be- 
fore the Prefect and the Prefect said : "Where are the treas- 
ures of the church?" And the archdeacon answered and 
said : "They are without, my lord, in the square of the palace 
of the Prefect of Rome." Then was the Prefect glad of heart 
and he went to the door of the palace, expecting to see the 
square crowded with wagons bringing the treasures of the 
church, and he saw, as it were, all the beggars of the City 
of Rome in the square of the palace of the Prefect of the 
City of Rome. Then the Prefect turned with fury and said 
to the archdeacon : 

"What meanest thou by this?" 

"I mean," answered the archdeacon, "to obey my lord, and 
bring to him the treasures of the church." 



224 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

And the Prefect cried : 

"What! callest thou these the riches of the church?" 

And the archdeacon answered and said : 

"Yea, my lord, the lives of the people are the wealth of the 
church." 

Therefore, the Prefect was angry and he commanded his 
soldiers to take the archdeacon and put him to death. And 
the soldiers, seeing that the Prefect was very wroth, went 
and made a great gridiron and stripped the archdeacon and 
bound him naked to the gridiron and broiled him over a slow 
fire, — and so he died. 

Thus did the story come back to me as I stood in the 
Chapel of St. Sixtus in the Catacombs of Rome, and I came 
up out of the Catacombs into the light of day, and it was 
toward evening; for the day was far spent; and I went my 
way down the Via Appia to the church of St. Paul Without 
the Gates ; and as I walked I saw the dome of Michaelangelo 
hanging in the evening sky, and I looked and I said: "There 
is the dome of St. Peter's but what has become of the God 
Christus, and where are his people?" 



Book VII 
THE GODS OF THE GREEK DIALECTIC 



CHAPTER XLVIII 

- 

The Gods of the Greek Dialectic 

When we look for the God Christus after his religion, — 
by reason of the devotion and self sacrifice of his people, 
grown rich and powerful and popular, — has emerged from 
the darkness of the Catacombs into the light of the upper 
world, we find that the God has shared in the elevation of 
his religion. Christus is no longer, exclusively, if at all, the 
God of the Working Class, bearing their griefs and sharing 
their sorrows ; He is in process of becoming the God of the 
Leisure Class and is taking his seat with the princes of the 
people. He is no longer hid from the wise and the prudent 
and revealed only unto babes ; his destiny is in the keeping 
of the wisdom of the philosopher and the prudence of the 
lawyer. He has ceased, or almost ceased, to be an object of 
devotion, and has become a principle of contention. He has 
left the lowly places of religion to stand in the storm-center 
of theology. He is no longer Christus, the Son of Jehovah, 
the War God of the Bene-Israel, nor is he the Son of Jehovah 
The Righteous, nor yet the Son of The Holy One. He has 
become the Son of the Absolute. He is one of the gods of 
the Greek Dialectic. 

This transformation of Christus from the God of a simple 
religion into the God of an abstruse theology was as inevit- 
able as it was for him unfortunate. When he left his native 
heath in Galilee and entered into the Graeco-Roman world, 
Christus had to accommodate himself to the thought of that 
world and adjust himself to its policies. 

The vitality of the Christian religion, the burning zeal of 
its people, its moral elevation, its definite philosophy of his- 
tory, its doctrine of resurrection and judgment, made a pow- 
erful appeal not only to the emotions but to the intelligence 

227 



228 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

of the men and the women to whom it was preached. As 
compared with the absurdity of the Greek Mythos, wherein 
the gods were mutilating the gods, in which there was no 
hint of the origin of the world, only chaos and black night 
at a beginning, I say, in comparison with this indefiniteness 
and absurdity the Christian account of Creation seemed clear 
and sane. 

When the morality of Zeus, as described by the poets, was 
set side by side with the morality of Jehovah and Christus, 
as pictured by the prophets and evangelists, the old gods 
could not but suffer in the presence of the new. Men and 
women wearied with unbridled indulgence fled from the pleas- 
ure-loving gods of the Greeks to find relief in the ascetic gods 
of the Hebrews. Y 

Early in its history the religion of the despised Nazarene 
began to draw into the circle of its influence the best minds 
as well as the noblest souls of the Mediterranean world. Jesus 
had been dead hardly ten years before the great Rabbi, 
scholar, and thinker, Saul of Tarsus, ceased to persecute and 
became an apostle of the Lord. The influence, direct and in- 
direct, of this mind upon the character and the fortunes of the 
religion which it adopted is beyond calculation. Without 
Paul, Christianity, in all probability, might have been no 
more than the passing religion of an obscure Jewish sect. 
When Paul was once converted to a belief in Jesus, — that he 
was the Christ, — he melted that belief in the fires of his in- 
tense emotion and recast it in the mould of his intelligence. 
Paul lifted Christus and his religion from its local environment 
and made it universal. Jesus ceased to be a Jew crucified to 
glut the hatred of the Pharisee and to quiet the fear of th? 
Roman ; he became, in the thought of Paul, the Lamb of 
God slain from the foundation of the world, as propitiation 
for the sin of the world. 

Paul took the folklore of the Hebrew scriptures and or- 
ganized it into a theology. Paul himself was intellectually 
the child of the Hebrew Scripture crossed by Greek culture. 
The Jehovah of the Scriptures was in his mind identified with 
the Absolute of Plato. He was the god who dwelt in the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 229 

light which no man could approach unto. Paul took the 
naive Hebrew philosophy of history and made it cosmic ; he 
carried it far back of the mere creation of the heavens and 
earth into the inner shrine of the secret counsels of God. 

If Peter was the founder of the church, Paul was the father 
of theology. He opened the door that made the Christian 
religion of easy access to the Grecian mind. He removed 
from Jehovah the odium of provincialism, making him cos- 
mopolitan. He gave to the Grseco-Roman world what it must 
have (if it would be saved), a catholic religion. 

This Jewish scholar and preacher did not know, and could 
not know, that the casual letters which he was writing to his 
converts would be to future ages the quarry of theology ; 
that out of the flashes of his genius was flowing the lava, from 
which, when cold and hard, men should hew great systems of 
dogma, in which the God Christus should be enclosed and 
entombed. Yet so it has come to pass. 

In the Second Century of the Christian era the Greek 
philosopher found in the Christian church a congenial home. 
He entered it as its neophyte ; he soon became its master. 
Bringing with him his native philosophic conception, he leav- 
ened the dough of Christian thought and feeling, baked that 
dough in the fiery oven of his controversy, and gave it back 
to Christianity as the hard, dry, indigestible loaf of orthodoxy. 

The entrance of this new element into the religion of 
Christus was as outwardly innocent as it was inwardly subtle. 
The philosopher did not come into the church to exploit by 
means of the church his philosophic preconceptions, he was 
won by the spiritual grace and the moral beauty of the God 
Christus. Once in, however, he could not help bringing his 
thought to bear upon the life of the religion of his adoption 
and slowly transforming it until it became not the religion of 
his adoption but the religion of his creation. 

We have in the story of Justin Martyr an instance of this 
guileless entrance of the philosopher into the church. Justin 
was a scholar and a thinker. He had traveled from country 
to country, sitting at the feet of the great masters of philoso- 
phy, to grasp, if he might, the secret of life, to know why 



230 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

and for what he was living. This man was a seeker after 
truth, and no matter how far he traveled, truth, like the hori- 
zon, was ever beyond and before him. When weary of his 
pursuit, he tells us, he was walking one day on the shore of 
the sea, meditating upon the vanity of learning, when he was 
approached by a venerable stranger, who asked him the oc- 
casion of his thoughtfulness. Made confident by the open, 
benign countenance of this wayfaring man, Justin laid bare 
to him his heart ; told him of his longing for truth, of his vain 
search, and of his weariness even to despair. Then the 
stranger told him that truth was not to be found in philoso- 
phy but in religion, not in thinking but in living, and pro- 
ceeded to unfold to yhim the life story of Jesus ben Joseph, 
the Christus of God. As Justin listened his heart was taken 
captive and he followed the stranger to a gathering of the 
Christians, was baptized, and so became a father in and a 
martyr of the church. 

After this manner, hundreds upon hundreds of Grecian phil- 
osophers and Egyptian sages embraced the religion of Jesus. 
Not content to leave it in its simplicity, they founded famous 
schools for its explanation in Antioch, Alexandria, and the 
cities of the Empire, and wrote the next chapter in the history 
of the "Ways of the Gods." 



CHAPTER XLIX 
The Coming of the Absolute 

There is a story classic to Harvard University, which is 
told of that genial philosopher the late William James (blessed 
be his shade !) and of his equally genial colleague and friend 
the late Josiah Royce. James and Royce, though bosom 
friends, were bitter philosophical enemies; Royce was an 
Idealist, James was a Pragmatist. James was a disciple of 
the school of Heraclitus, Royce was a follower of Plato. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 231 

Whenever these men met the scrimmage was on. One after- 
noon as Royce and James were contending in philosophic 
warfare, the wife of James snapped her kodak and caught 
her husband in the act of shaking his fist under the nose of 
Royce. When Mrs. James had developed her picture she 
showed it to her husband; he took it and wrote under the 
contending figures the words : "Damn the Absolute." 

In damning the Absolute James was blaspheming the great 
God of the Greek Dialectic. Before this Absolute the intel- 
lect of man has bowed in abject submission and his heart 
stood still in holy terror. In fear of the Absolute men have 
sacrificed their reason, arrested the progress of thought, made 
heresy a crime, and filled the earth with blood and tears. 

Who is the Absolute and whence came he? To answer this 
question we must go far back in the history of man, when 
nature was putting man to school and he was learning to talk. 
Whether speech is a divine gift or a human achievement may 
be open to question. If a divine gift, it is the most useful of 
all the gifts the gods have given to man ; if a human achieve- 
ment, it reflects the highest credit upon and gives great ad- 
vantage to the race of animals which by means of this faculty 
of speech have been able to arrange and express their thoughts 
and emotions, to communicate easily with one another, and to 
organize themselves into societies for mutual advantage. Men 
who are of a common speech always have a common interest. 

That speech is an acquirement rather than an original gift 
is, I think, established by the fact that we all have to learn 
to talk after we are born ; and the form of our speech depends 
upon our environment. If our infancy is spent in France, we 
will speak French ; if in England, English. A child can as 
easily acquire one language as another. It is only after our 
habits of speech are formed that acquisition of a new lan- 
guage is difficult ; but at no time in our lives is it impossible. 
Speech comes by hearing; if one leaves one's native land 
and resides for a long time in a foreign land, one will almost 
of necessity acquire the speech of one's residence and lose 
that of one's birth. 



232 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The origin of speech is naively set forth in the account of 
creation which we find in the second chapter of Genesis, 
where it is written : "And out of the ground the Lord Jehovah 
formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, 
and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them ; 
and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was 
the name thereof." Undoubtedly this account of the origin of 
language is correct in its main elements: speech did begin in 
names. And living creatures, being the enemies and friends 
of man, were the first to receive from him the honor and 
convenience of a name. Some peculiarity, such as a growl 
or a shriek, was imitated and so became the name of the 
animal or bird uttering the growl or the shriek. When once 
man had acquired the habit of naming things the immense 
usefulness of this acquirement caused its rapid expansion. 
To give a thing a name is to give it definiteness ; by its name 
we separate it from all other things. If a man says: "I met 
a man," we know at once that he did not meet a horse or a 
cow ; if he says I met John Smith we are aware that it was 
not William Robinson that he met or any other man save 
John Smith. If one had to describe the man whom one met 
by the color of his hair and his eyes, the length of his nose, 
and the squareness of his chin, we should not, nine times out 
of ten, be able to recognize the man by the description, but 
when he says John Smith, then we know at once the man by 
the name of the man. The descriptions of the hero and the 
heroine by an author are always amusing to the physiological 
reader, for he sees at once that were he to paint a picture 
from such description, he would out-whistle Whistler in im- 
pressionism. 

"But," at this point cries my impatient reader, "but what has 
all this to do with the Absolute?" Have patience, dear reader, 
and you will soon see that this has everything to do with 
the Absolute. 

From naming things, man went on to the naming of quali- 
ties ; some things were sweet and some were sour, that is, 
some things were pleasant to the taste, expanding the glands, 
and some were unpleasant, contracting the glands; hence the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 233 

sweets and the sours. Some things were bright to the eyes 
and some were dark, and so the observer became conscious 
of and began to name the reds and the greens, the white and 
the black. Man saw some things at rest and some in motion 
and he gave names to these states of existence. He saw that 
some things were like other things and he put these together 
under a common name. So we have "man," "horse," and 
"dog" as the general names of a vast number of individual 
men, horses, and dogs. We have "sweet" and "sour," "soft" 
and "hard," as general names for certain classes of sensations. 
We have "good" and "bad" as distinguishing certain lines of 
conduct in their relation to our happiness or unhappiness. 

In the course of the evolution of language man acquired 
three faculties which, while they have been of untold advan- 
tage, have also been the occasion of much confusion in his 
thought and misfortune to his life. These faculties are gen- 
eralization, classification, and abstraction. By generalization 
man brings together a vast number of things that have some- 
what in common, by classification he gives to those things a 
common name, by abstraction he takes away from the classi- 
fied object all particulars and leaves only the general char- 
acteristics ; as, for instance, when one says "horse," one ab- 
stracts height, weight, color, breed, and leaves in the mind only 
the general-notion horse. In the world of reality there is no 
such thing as horse, only a horse or horses; horse is simply a 
convenience in thinking. The same is true of qualities ; when 
one says "good," one has a general notion of actions conducive 
to well being; in reality there is no such thing as good, only 
good deeds. Good is a counter in thinking. 

And here came the danger ; when generalization, classifi- 
cation, and abstraction were in the full swing of habit, this 
habit induced the further habit on the part of the mind to 
think abstractly, to think vaguely of horse instead of horses, 
of good instead of good deeds. And the more highly devel- 
oped the language, the more readily it gave itself to this mode 
of abstract thinking. Children always think concretely as do 
primitive and uneducated people; the grown-up, educated 
man does nine-tenths of his thinking abstractly. He takes a 



234 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

glance at a given object, refers it to its class, and has done 
with it. The primitive man sees the object before him with 
its particular features ; the thought of the primitive man is 
vivid and limited, the thought of the cultured man is vague 
and wide. The primitive man deals for the most part with 
nouns and verbs, the cultured man with adjectives and ad- 
verbs; the primitive man is a poet, the cultured man is a 
philosopher. 

The most highly cultured people the world has ever known 
were the Greeks, and especially the Attic Greek in the time 
of Athenian supremacy. These people developed the rich- 
est language ever evolved by man. The Greek expresses the 
nicest shades of meaning ; gives itself to the most delicate 
abstractions. It was this perfection of language that was 
both the glory and the snare of the Greek. The Greek mind 
lost itself in its language, was entangled in its own subtlety. 
Greek philosophy was the outcome of this effort of the Greek 
mind to carry generalization, classification, and abstraction 
to the limit. The Greek dealt with words rather than with 
things. His itch was not for observation but for definition. 
Words became to him realities, existing apart from the mind. 

The prince of these jugglers was Plato. Plato was essen- 
tially a man of words. His doctrine of ideas gives reality to 
words, good is a reality apart from good deeds; before there 
can be good deeds there must be good. This abstract good 
is the origin of all concrete good. So also there were sweet 
and sour from which all sweets and sours were derived. 
Plato's world of ideas was a world of adjectives waiting to 
be united to their nouns. When one penetrates into the ideal 
world of Plato one is in a fantastic world where everything is 
wrong-end first; good is waiting for good deeds, sweet to be 
sweets, and sour to be sours. One cannot help thinking that 
the philosopher is playing with words, — and so he is. One 
can see a twinkle in his philosophic eyes when he uses words 
as a child uses blocks in a nursery to build fantastic struc- 
tures that can serve no purpose except to amuse the child or 
the philosopher. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 235 

The last and greatest of abstractions is Being. Being is 
existence as existence, apart from any existing thing. When 
one thinks of Being as Being one must be careful not to 
think of tall or short, narrrow or broad, dark or light, hard 
or soft, motion or change, wash your mind clean of every 
possible particular and think only of the general, and you 
have Being. And Being is the Absolute. 

Plato was illogical and identified good with Being; and the 
Christian fathers, still more illogical, identified Being with 
the Hebrew God Jehovah, whence came all the confusion of 
Christian theology. 

The Absolute is absolute and he is nothing else. He is 
imprisoned in his own absolutism. If the Absolute do but 
wink his eye, his absolutism is in danger; if he sneeze, it is 
shattered. When Christian theology made Absolute Being 
its primal god it was on the horns of a dilemma. If its god 
acted he couldn't be Absolute, and if he couldn't act he was 
of no use as a god. Theology first shut God up in his ab- 
solutism then had to resort to all sorts of contrivances to 
get him out of his prison. Like Haroun al Raschid, this 
Absolute had to put on the disguise of the relative and so 
get out into his world. Why should the Absolute go to the 
trouble of creating a universe. Absolute Good cannot better 
Absolute Good. We are told that the Absolute was lonely ; 
"What," says Ralph Cudworth, that delightful Flatonist of 
the Seventeenth Century, in his 'Intellectual System of the 
Universe,' "what was He [the Absolute] doing in his melan- 
cholic dungeon before he entered upon the work of creation?" 
The theologians have been sadly bested to give any good, 
plausible reason why the Absolute God should disturb his 
absolutism by creating a world. How can changelessness 
initiate change? 

Poor dear old Plato, how by your juggling you have con- 
fused the world ! How you persuaded men to put the cart 
before the horse, the concept before the percept, the idea 
before the thing itself. When you spelled idea with a capital 
I and persuaded men that the idea was antecedent to and 
the cause of the reality, you played a scurvey trick on human 



236 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

thinking. You led men to believe that something was noth- 
ing and nothing is something. As Walter Pater says: "The 
Absolute, when you come to it, is nothing, pure idealism 
is pure nothingness." Well might Claus in Balzac's story 
"The Search of The Absolute," spend fortune and life in the 
search and never find it, for the Absolute is nothing, — and 
nothing can never be found. 

Where Christian theology went on to identify the Jehovah 
god of the old Testament with the Absolute Being of the 
Greek philosophy, it entered upon a course of bewildering 
contradictions that have made it the despair of the human 
mind. The best that the mind can say is : "I believe be- 
cause I cannot understand." To sing: 

Change and decay in all around I see, 

O, Thou who changest not, abide with me. 

may soothe the restless soul, but to make of changelessness a 
god is to make your god impotent for good or evil. The 
Absolute of the Greek Dialectic, — without extension, color, 
feeling, or motion, — may be a great god in the intelligence, 
but he can never reach the heart. The Absolute is a god 
made out of a word, it is an adjective torn from its noun; 
and yet no Moloch of brass in the groves of Syria has been 
more cruel than this god of the Greek Dialectic. In his 
name thinking has been held a crime. Men and women and 
children have been burned in the fire of persecution because 
they have failed to say of the god Absolute just what his 
priests commanded them to say. Far removed from all that 
is relative to the life of man, the Absolute, like some bed- 
ridden tyrant, has spread terror over the earth. Well might 
James say: "Damn the Absolute!" Only by coming out of 
his absolutism can God come into his world. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 237 

CHAPTER L 
Christus, The Son of The Absolute 

As long as the person and the religion of Jesus ben Joseph 
were in the keeping of his own people there was no dispute 
as to his origin or nature. It never occurred to Peter, James, 
or John to think of him as other than as a man. He was the 
son of Mary, and his father's name was Joseph. He differed 
from those about him in degree but not in kind. 

Jesus was a greater man than Peter : Peter was the disciple 
and Jesus the master. His intense personality, with his pow- 
ers of loving, drew John to his bosom. His mother and his 
brothers, unable to comprehend his genius, said that he was 
beside himself. No one, I say, when he was alive, thought 
of Jesus other than a man, — a great man, a good man, a 
crazy man, — all sorts of opinions were entertained in regard 
to him ; but not for one moment did men think of him as a 
god, not for a single instant did Jesus have any such thought 
of himself. When the rich man bows to him and calls him 
"Good Master," he answers roughly: "Why callest thou me 
good, there is but one good, — that is God." If we except 
the prologue to the Fourth Gospel there is not a word in the 
New Testament affirming anything like the Deity of Jesus. 

The very fact that his followers came to look upon him as 
the Messiah, or the Christus of God, was on their part an 
affirmation of his human origin and his human nature. To 
be Messiah he must be of the seed of David according to 
the flesh. He was the anointed of the Lord just as David 
was the anointed of the Lord. He was a man upon whom had 
come a double portion of God's spirit. He was the chosen 
servant of God to do his will. 

Even the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, which are 
of much later origin than the body of those Gospels, do not 
give to Jesus the attributes of Deity. His origin is the out- 
come of a creative act of Jehovah. Just as Jehovah 
created the first man out of clay, so he created the second 



238 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

man out of the substance of human nature in the womb of the 
Virgin. Even in Second Century thought Adam and Jesus 
were equally the creatures of God. The early church did not 
pray to Jesus, it prayed to God in the name of Jesus. 

When the religion of Jesus passed out of the control of the 
Jewish mind and conscience and came into the power of the 
acute intelligence of the Greek and the practical judgment of 
the Roman, an elective process set in by which elements of 
Greek philosophy and Roman politics were amalgamated with 
the principles of the Hebrew religion to bring into being 
that new body of thought known as Christianity. 

The first change wrought in the system of Hebraic think- 
ing was the deification of Christus. This deification was the 
instinctive tribute of the common people, — the slaves and the 
artisans, — to the character and work of Jesus. When salva- 
tion was preached to these outcasts of the Roman world, 
when they were told that Jesus had died for them, that he 
had come again from the dead, that he had gone away from 
them into heaven, and that he was to come again with glory 
to judge the world, to cast down the mighty from their seat 
and exalt the humble and meek, it was perfectly natural for 
these simple souls to think of Jesus as a God. They were 
not philosophers troubled about the unity of God, they were 
plain folk to whom gods were as simple as themselves. The 
gods were to them almost as numerous as men ; they changed 
their gods when they changed their city. They had wor- 
shipped Apollo, now they worshipped Jesus. The change was 
no greater than if a man to-day were to cease to be an Epis- 
copalian and become a member of the Salvation Army, — if so 
great. 

That men should become gods was not strange to that 
generation; had not Julius Caesar, almost in their day, be- 
come a god, with his place among the stars and his month 
one of the months of the year? Was not the image of Divus 
Caesar set up in every city for men to worship, and was not 
Christus greater than Caesar? This reasoning on the part of 
the mass of the Christian people deified Jesus. Before the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 239 

Second Century had passed away the Christus was the cen- 
tral object of Christian worship. The church no longer 
prayed through him but to him. The cry of "Christe Eleison!" 
went up from a million hearts that looked to this god for 
mercy and salvation. By the end of the Second Century the 
Deity of Jesus was the heart and the soul of the Christian 
faith. 

At the same time the Christian church was compelled to 
recognize another God beside Jesus. Jesus was not the origi- 
nal God; he was the Son of God. The Son was nearer and 
dearer to the Christian heart than the Father, but still there 
was the Father in the background, demanding the acknowl- 
edgment of his original divinity. So that the Christian church 
to the ordinary observer had two gods, the Jehovah Father 
and the Christus Son. And yet this sect was crying with 
all its lungs that there was and could be only one God. It 
was this contradiction that brought on the Christian body the 
derision of its enemies and sadly disturbed the thoughts of its 
friends. 

When the Greek philosopher who was a Christian was 
called upon to give a reason for the faith that was in him, he 
had as a Christian to hold fast to the Deity of Jesus, as a 
philosopher he had to preserve the Unity of God. When the 
heathen scoffer asked him if Christus were a god, he must 
answer : "Yes," when the same scoffer asked if the Father 
were a God, the philosopher must still answer: "Yes." Then 
says the scoffer: "I cannot see how for all your boasting you 
differ from the vulgar round about you. It is true that you 
have only two gods, while they may have half a dozen, but 
that is a matter of degree. You admit the principle of more 
than one god; having two now, you may have a dozen next 
year." "No, no," protests the Christian philosopher, growing 
red in the face, "you misjudge us altogether, we have and 
can have only one God, Christus is not a god in his own 
right; he is the Son of God." "Oh, I see," says the scoffer, 
"but it seems to me that you have not bettered your case ; if a 
father and a son are two men, why should not a father and 



240 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

son be two gods? And, besides, how does it come to pass 
that your father God has a son? Has your God a wife to 
whose couch he goes up and begets sons and daughters, even 
as Marduk in the Temple of Babylon?" "Never, never!" 
shouts the Christian philosopher in a rage; "such a thought 
were blasphemy ; our God is holy and knows not the shame 
of a woman's love." "How, then, has he a son?" says the 
scoffer. 

This problem of the relation of the unity of God to the 
Deity of Jesus disturbed the peace of the Church for four 
centuries. In the process of its solution the basis of Chris- 
tianity was changed from conduct to creed ; it ceased to be 
a religion of the heart and became a dogma of the intellect. 

The church had to define the Sonship of Jesus Christ in 
such a way as not to disturb the absolute oneness of the 
Father ; God was alone, unapproachable, without spouse or 
marriage-bed, and yet he must have a son. Unconsciously the 
theologians of the Third Century devised a method of genera- 
tion which nature had used in the beginning of life. In the 
slime of the river bottoms are little creatures the life history 
of which antedates man's by a million generations; in these 
minute creatures we see how life was continued before sex 
with all its complexities was evolved to be the glory and the 
shame of the world. The amoeba, like God, is one and al- 
ways one; it is complete in itself, no female of the species 
disturbs its peace. It neither marries nor is given in mar- 
riage. It is in itself both male and female. When the amoeba 
grows too large for comfort it contracts in the center and 
breaks in two, and there are two amoebae instead of one, yet 
each one is one. This is generation by budding. 

So it was taught by the philosophers that God generated in 
himself another God and begat out of his own self a son. 
But even this did not save the Unity of God, for the Son 
could not be equal to the Father, because the Father Was 
before the Son in time. The Father was eternal,— without 
cause, beginning, or end. The Father was the cause of the 
Son, and the generation of the Son was the beginning of 
time. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 241 

It was at this point that the great battle was fought in the 
Fourth Century that resulted in the establishment of the 
orthodox form of Christianity. Two parties, — one led by 
Arius the Libyan, and the other by Athanasius the Arch- 
bishop of Alexandria, — struggled for the mastery in the body 
of the church. The party of Athanasius asserted that Chris- 
tus was the Son of God from all eternity and Arius affirming 
that there was a time when Christus was not tqv xotsoux tqv; 
was the war cry of the Arian. Arius kept Christus in the 
region of creation, Athanasius put him outside time and 
space. Arius maintained the Unity of God, Athanasius up- 
held the Deity of Christus. Arius made the Oneness of God, 
Athanasius the Presence of God, the supreme article of faith. 

Both Arius and Athanasius were Platonists holding to the 
Absolute. Arius kept the Absolute intact; Athanasius gave 
him a way of escape. Arius represented the primitive con- 
ception of the nature and mission of Jesus Christ, Athanasius 
the conception of the Philosophic schools. 

In the course of this contention Jesus was robbed of his 
simplicity; instead of a being of flesh and blood, — born of a 
woman, made under the law, a man among men, living the life 
and dying the death of man, — he was transformed into a theo- 
logical concept. He was exalted to the right hand of the 
Majesty on high. He became God out of God, very God out 
of very God : the Second Person in the Adorable Trinity. 

This exaltation of Jesus lost him his hold on the hearts of 
the people. He ceased to be the God of a religion and be- 
came the Divinity of a theology. In order to adapt himself 
to the demands of the Greek intelligence, he had to sacrifice 
that which had made him dear to the heart of the shepherd 
and the slave. Men could worship Jesus, whether god or 
man, but they could not and cannot worship the Second 
Person of the Adorable Trinity. Such a god is too abstract 
and abstruse to hold the devotion of the simple. 

The elevation of Christus into the regions of the Absolute 
removed him from the realm of human experience. His fate 
was the fate of all the gods. When the gods by reason of 



242 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

changes in thought and circumstance outgrow the common 
people then that befalls them which happens to the English 
statesman when he outlives his usefulness in the Commons, 
he is sent up into the House of Lords. And so it happened 
to Jesus ben Joseph. 



CHAPTER LI 
The Divine Personality of Christus, Son of The Absolute 

By reason of his exaltation to the rank of an Absolute God, 
Jesus ben Joseph lost his human and acquired a divine per- 
sonality. This matter was settled in the Council of Ephesus 
at Whitsuntide, in the year 431. One Anastasius, a presby- 
ter of Constantinople, at the instance and with the full con- 
sent of his bishop, had warned his hearers, in a sermon, of 
the danger of giving Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the title of 
Mother of God. It is impossible, said the preacher, that God 
the Absolute should have a mother; if he were born, he could 
not be Absolute ; and if he were not Absolute, he could not be 
God. The preacher went on to say that Mary was the 
mother of the human person Jesus, with whom the divine 
person Christus, descending from heaven, was associated. 

No sooner was this utterance made than there was an 
uproar among the monks and the clergy, for the title Theo- 
tokos (or Mother of God) had grown dear to the monkish 
and clerical heart. Appeal was made from the judgment of 
Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, who had confirmed the 
doctrine of his presbyter, to Cyril, bishop of Alexandria (the 
same who caused the brilliant Hypatia to be cruelly put to 
death), and to John, bishop of Antioch. So great was the 
contention over this question that the emperors Theodosius and 
Valentinian ordered the bishops metropolitan with their suf- 
fragans to assemble in council in the city of Ephesus to de- 
bate and settle this dispute. Cyril of Alexandria with his 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 243 

suffragans and partisans arrived first, and without waiting for 
John of Antioch, who was delayed, proceeded to condemn 
Nestorius and Anastasius as heretics ; to deprive them of 
their offices in the church, and to decree their perpetual ban- 
ishment. John of Antioch, when he reached the city, was 
indignant at the hasty action of Cyril and held up the decis- 
ion. But after a furious controversy, in which Christian 
charity was torn to tatters, the party of Cyril prevailed, the 
teaching of Nestorius was declared to be heretical, and as a 
heretic Nestorius was deprived of his holy office and ban- 
ished from the city of Constantinople. 

The effect of this decision was to affirm that Jesus, the 
Christus, was one and only one person. The Nestorian doc- 
trine had implied a double personality in the one individual ; 
the human personality of Jesus and the divine personality of 
Christus, so that one could say this Jesus did as a man : as 
a man he wept at the tomb of Lazarus and died on the cross, 
for God can neither weep nor die, and this Christus did as a 
god : as a god he commanded the winds to cease and restored 
the dead son of the widow of Nain alive to his mother. 

But the decree of the Council put an end to this distinction. 
Jesus the Christus was One Person, and that Person was God. 
God wept at the tomb of Lazarus and died on the cross. 

The Nestorian heresy, like the Arian, was an effort to 
save the Absolute. The Nestorian doctrine kept God free 
from the entanglements arising from the human imperfec- 
tions of Jesus; the orthodox teaching made God responsible 
for every word and act of Jesus. It gave infallibility and im- 
peccability to the character of Jesus, for God could not err, 
neither could He sin. The orthodox view was more logical, 
from the standpoint of pure reason, the Nestorian more in 
accord with the facts. 

As we read the story of this Council and of the Council 
of Chalcedon which followed, we are grieved at the utter lack 
of charity in the hearts of these bishops and doctors of the 
church. During these controversies that spiritual disease was 
developed known as odium theologicum, — a disease that soon 
became an incurable malady destroying the very life of the 



244 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Christian religion. These controversies, which raged so 
fiercely, consumed all that was lovely and saving in the re- 
ligion of Jesus ben Joseph, leaving nothing but clinkers and 
ashes. 

The very words of the controversies that rent the church 
of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries have become meaningless 
to us. When on Easter day the choir sings to Stainer's 
music the Nicean creed, the music may thrill our emotions, 
but the words do not stir our thoughts. For all the good 
that comes to our understanding, the words might as well be 
in an unknown tongue. The Roman Church does well to sing 
the creeds and service of the church in Latin ; this soothes the 
emotions and does not disturb the mind. 

As a matter of mental gymnastics I ask the reader to be 
patient while I try to make as clear as his, or her, and my 
own mental capacity will permit, the meaning of the words 
which set the early church on fire, and which, cold and hard 
as volcanic rock, are now imbedded in our creeds. The con- 
troversies, the outcome of which was the orthodox Chris- 
tianity of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, and which re- 
mains orthodox to the present day, raged around two words : 
"nature" and "person." Was Christus of the same nature or 
substance as the Father, and had he a human as well as a 
divine personality. The first question was the cause of the 
Arian, the second of the Nestorian controversy. What then is 
"nature" or "substance" and what is "person?" 

The best definition of a word is to be found, not in the 
dictionary, but in the ordinary use of the word as it is cur- 
rent on the lips of men. When we speak of human nature, 
cr as the Greeks would call it, of human substance, we have 
in mind all that is substantial to the existence of man. Hu- 
man nature implies the upright position, the sensitive hand, 
the conscious mind, the social instinct. All that goes to the 
making of a man preexists, as one may say, in the substance 
out of which man is made. When we are conceived our 
vitality is the vitality of the human seed, our substance the 
substance of human flesh and blood ; it is because of this sub- 
stance, which is preexistent to our birth, that we are born 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 245 

human and not canine or other being. All around us we see 
this fact of nature or substance : in the tree, in the horse, in 
the dog. It is this substance that separates one order of life 
from another. A man is a man and not a dog, because he is 
of the substance or nature of a man and not of a dog. 

On the surface these substances are permanent and ex- 
clusive ; a man never should be, never can be, never will be 
a dog, his nature or substance forbids it. Now the Greek 
mind, aware of this surface fact, asserted that there was a 
god nature or substance forever separating God from all that 
is not God. God could not be man any more than man could 
be God. As God he must be forever apart and alone. This 
is not the desire of his soul, it is the necessity of his nature, — 
and according to this theory man is man and God is God and 
never the twain shall meet. It was the effort of the Nicean 
theologian to bridge this unbridgable gulf. The gods of the 
heathen could not be gods, because they were so human ; if 
Jesus were a mere man, as it is said, he could not be God 
because he was a man. And there you are ! God is shut out 
of this world and he can't get in ; he needs man and man 
needs him ; but it is a far cry from the loneliness of the Abso- 
lute to the necessities of the human soul. One deep calleth 
another, because of the noise of the waterpipes, — the deep of 
God's loneliness calls to the deep of man's necessity. To 
meet this necessity the Heaven, like Uranos of old, descends 
to the embraces of earth ; the Person of God comes down and 
impregnates the womb of a woman. And God is born and 
lives and dies, as does a man, and all this that man and God 
may meet and know one another. 

This is a beautiful and, under certain conditions of thought, 
a workable theory. In spite of its outre character and in- 
numerable contradictions, the theory prevailed as long as men 
held to the doctrine of the immutability of substance or 
nature. This was Plato's doctrine of Idea or the Absolute ap- 
plied to theology. Each existence in the visible world had 
its form or substance in the invisible world and it could never 
change. Man is man and dog is dog, because man and dog 
have their archetype in the eternal mind which altereth not. 



246 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

He who holds to the Absolute and believes in the perma- 
nence of species must devise some such artificial method as 
that of the Nicean creed to open a way for the Absolute to 
become relative and enter into the activities of the world. 

When once, however, this illusion of the permanence of 
nature or substance is dispelled, when we see as we do to-day 
that species are not immutable, that nature or substance in- 
stead of being as hard as iron, is as plastic as clay; that man 
and dog have more in common than in difference — the di*- 
gesting stomach, the breathing lung, the beating heart are 
the same in the dog and in the man ; that human nature re- 
cords the experience of all nature from the lowest infusoria to 
the highest and most 'gifted man, then we see that all the 
elaborate apparatus of the Nicean theology was devised to 
overcome a difficulty that did not exist. We may pity these 
men as we pity the builders of the Tower of Babel, they were 
building a bridge to span a supposed chasm between God and 
man, — a chasm so wide that it needed the infinite to reach 
from side to side, — and lo, and behold ! the chasm is not 
there. Earth and sky are not separated ; they are united by 
space. Man and God are not divided, they are united by 
nature. Man is the manifestation of God. Get Plato's Ab- 
solute out of the way and God has no difficulty in getting 
into His world. He is always there. 

So much for nature or substance; now what is person? 
Persona, from which person is derived, is the Latin name for 
the mask that the actor wore on the stage to designate the 
character he was playing. His mask was his distinction. Ae- 
cording to his mask he was playing this character and not 
that. He came and went according to the cue of his mask. 
So the Latin writers came to use this word to signify dis- 
tinction or character. The persona of a man is that which is 
peculiar to him ; by his personality he is separated from all 
other human beings, — as we say, "no two persons are ex- 
actly alike." Later "person" came to mean the man himself. 
Persona was the ego, — the I am, — which lay behind and held 
together the nature of the man ; its thoughts and feelings and 
actions were the thoughts and feelings and actions of such a 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 247 

person. The Greeks to express this meaning used the word 
hupostasis, that which stands under and upholds, the bind- 
ing, sustaining principle in each man which makes him one 
and not many. Personality is distinction. We speak of a 
man as a great personality, because the distinctive elements 
in his nature separate him from the vulgar. 

When theology came to apply the term persona to the 
Absolute, it was guilty of an incurable contradiction; one 
might as well speak of a square circle. Personality is limi- 
tation and a limited Absolute is just no Absolute at all. In 
spite of its twisting and turning, the Christian theology when 
it gave divine personality to Christ was polytheistic to the 
core. Its Trinity, in spite of all its shrieking, is three gods 
and never one, and the Christian dogma naively recognizes 
this fact in assigning to each of its three gods separate func- 
tions. It teaches its children to say: "I believe in God the 
Father who made me and all the world and in God the Son 
who redeemed me and all mankind, and in God the Holy 
Ghost who sanctifieth me and all the people of God." There 
you have three persons, each person having a different char- 
acter and playing a different part. Now, if you say that the 
three persons are one god in the substance of the god-head, 
you do not make them one any more than you make three 
men one, by saying they are one in the substance of humani- 
ty. Of course they are; but what of it? 

The blame of all this lies with the Absolute, which James 
in his wrath damned. If it were not for the Absolute we 
should not be wandering in and out and around about in 
these theological tortuosities, singing "three in one" and "one 
in three" as if we were children playing puzzle. We should 
just take "God" simply, as the primitive man took him and 
as the plain folk take him to-day, as he comes to us in the 
light and in the dark, in the voices of our solitude and in the 
faces of our friends. As St. Thomas a Kempis says: "It is 
better to love God than to define him." 

And the pity of it all is that it makes God uninteresting. 
Jesus ben Joseph, forcing the issue in Jerusalem ; giving voice 



248 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

in the Courts of the Temple to a denunciatory eloquence un- 
equalled in the history of oratory ; bidding farewell to his 
friends, when he knows death is at hand, with a pathos that 
moves the heart; standing before Pilate in a way that wins 
the admiration of his judge; dying with the cry, "Why hast 
thou forsaken me?" on his lips, — all that has a deep abiding 
interest that wins and holds the heart. But to think of 
Christus, the Son of the Absolute, Light of Light, God out 
of God, Very God of Very God, Begotten and not made, 
being of one substance with the Father (of whom we must 
be careful not to divide the person nor confound the natures), 
— all that is as interesting as a chemical formula, useful, it 
may be, to the chemist, but to the common man, a mere ar- 
rangement of words. If the chemist can turn his formula 
into a living, burning light under our eyes, well! if not, — 
we sleep while he lectures. 

Poor Jesus ben Joseph, in all that thou hast gained in di- 
vine substance and personality, thou hast lost the more in 
human interest and devotion. 



Book VIII 
GODS OF THE LATIN LAWYERS 



CHAPTER LII 
The Celestial Caesar 

In the year 410 of the present era, the Goths, under the 
command of their chieftain Alaric, took and sacked the city 
of Rome. This event filled all the civilized world with as- 
tonishment and terror. It seemed to those then living as if 
the end of the world had come. The Mediterranean civiliza- 
tion, bereft of its imperial City, sank into a sullen and a dumb 
despair. There was no comfort in the present and no hope 
for the future. Rome, which for twelve centuries had been 
the dominant city of the then known world, was now the 
prey of the barbarian. Her patricians, bound with cords, 
were sold into slavery ; her matrons were given to the rude 
embrace of the bearded men of the north ; her treasures were 
pillaged to enrich the stranger. What Rome had so often 
inflicted upon other cities, she now suffered within her own 
walls. She who had been the mistress of a world was the 
captive of a tribe. She had enjoyed her long day of triumph, 
but now the night of disaster had fallen upon her. No won- 
der that the world trembled when Rome fell. 

Those who were of the old faith, worshippers of Jupiter 
Capitolinus, ascribed these calamities to the wrath of the 
ancient gods, because men had forsaken them and gone over 
to the worship of the parvenu gods of the Semitic dynasty. 
Christus, with his specious promises of life after death, had 
charmed the people away from the altars of Saturn and 
Venus, of Jupiter and Mars, who had in their keeping the 
good things of this world ; who through all the centuries had 
given Rome victory over her enemies and enriched her with 
the spoils of conquered lands. "Back to Jupiter!" was the 
cry of the Pagan. "Back to Jupiter! Away with these sor- 

251 



252 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

did gods of the Jew, who do not and cannot care for the City 
of Rome." 

It was this cry of the defeated gods of the old regime that 
roused St. Augustine, the greatest mind then living, to come 
to the rescue of the god of the religion to which he himself 
had been recently converted. The taking and the sacking of 
Rome gave to Augustine occasion and inspiration to write 
the greatest of all his books, — and they are many, — called by 
him "De Civitate Dei", — "Concerning the City of God." In 
the City of God Augustine not only defended the Christian 
religion against the assaults of its enemies, but he also or- 
ganized that religion into a consistent scheme to meet con- 
ditions consequent uporl the fall of Rome. In the place of 
the city of the Caesars he put the city of God. 

The Deus or God of Augustine was none other than Caesar 
himself, clothed with omnipotence, enthroned in the heavens 
as the absolute ruler of the world. Nowhere is the process 
of evolution more evident than in the development of the 
God of the Hebrew religion and the god of the Greek philoso- 
phy into the God of the Roman Church. This god of August- 
ine is the Absolute of Plato identified with the Jehovah of 
Isaiah and endowed with the political power of the Roman 
Caesar. 

The City of God of which Augustine treats was no ideal 
city, out of the sight and sound of man ; it was a city popu- 
lous and powerful ; a city that conquered Rome a century be- 
fore Alaric, the Goth, had set foot in Italy. It was a new 
Rome born out of the old. As a city it was highly organized 
and effective to take up and carry on the work of ruling the 
world, which had been of old and was to be far into the 
future the mission of the City of Rome. That City of God 
of which Augustine wrote was none other than the Chris- 
tian church of which Rome even then was considered the 
capital ; a claim which Rome was destined to press in season 
and out of season until she became once more the ruling city 
of the Western world. 

Christianity owes its religious conceptions to the genius 
of the Hebrew prophets; its dogma is the product of the sub- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 253 

tie mind of the Greek philosopher; its organization is the 
work of the Roman lawyer. A century and more before 
Augustine had written his book concerning the City of God, 
Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, had written his epoch-making 
treatise "De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate", — "Concerning the 
Unity of the Catholic Church." Cyprian was a brilliant and 
a successful lawyer who was converted to Christianity in mid- 
dle life, bringing to the service of that religion the training 
and the mental attitude of his profession. His conversion was 
the delight of the church and the despair of the outside world. 
When men of the character and ability of Cyprian embraced 
the fortunes of Jesus it was no longer possible to speak of 
Jesus and his following after the manner of Tacitus. In the 
days of Cyprian Christianity was already becoming respect- 
able ; it was still persecuted but the persecution gave it eclat. 
Cyprian himself died for the faith, but he died with the dig- 
nity of a Roman and not with the sordidness of the slave. 
The time had passed when men could become living torches 
to light the revels of drunken emperors. 

At the time of his martyrdom Cyprian was bishop of Carth- 
age ; at the outbreak of the persecution in the reign of the 
emperor Deeitis, Cyprian, at the prayer of his people, went 
into retirement. Under Gallus, the persecution being re- 
laxed, the bishop returned to Carthage and was active in the 
work of the church. When Valerian succeeded to the empire 
the persecution was renewed and Cyprian was first banished, 
then recalled and beheaded, to the sorrow not only of the 
Christian community, but also to the regret of the people of 
Carthage in general ; for he was a great and a good man, of 
whom the city was proud. 

When Cyprian came to his episcopate, he found his dio- 
cese rent by schism and sorely troubled by heresies. The 
Christian churches scattered throughout the empire were more 
or less at odds with one another — they differed both in mat- 
ters of faith and in rules of discipline. There was no central 
recognized authority to which disputes could be referred for 
settlement; each church was more or less a law unto itself, 
subject only to the binding force of the Christian tradition. 



254 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

It was to meet and to correct the evils consequent upon this 
lack of organization that Cyprian propounded his theory of the 
church in his treatise "De Unitate." 

Being a lawyer of the Roman Empire, Cyprian followed the 
lines of organization with which he was familiar. In the 
Empire power was centralized in the emperor. In theory 
the Imperium was conferred by the Senate ; in fact, it was 
the prize of the successful general, but whether chosen by the 
Senate or acclaimed by the legions, the emperor, when once 
an emperor, was the master of Rome. His word was law, 
his power personal and absolute. He could put men to death 
or banish them to Scythia without trial. He alone was res- 
ponsible for the safety of Rome, he appointed the officers of 
the State, he sent the pro-consuls to rule the provinces. From 
the farthest confines of Britain to the borders of Parthia there 
was not a man so great that the emperor could not destroy 
him. When the emperor had put a man over a city that man 
was not a servant of the people, he was the vicar of the em- 
peror. In other words, the government of Imperial Rome 
was government based upon authority centered in a person. 

It was this system of government that Cyprian applied to 
the uses of the Christian church. The Christian church was 
the City of God, even as the city of Rome was the city of 
Caesar. All authority was centered in God, and God was a 
person. In ruling the world, God delegated his power to 
persons chosen by himself. The church was his creation ; 
God gave power to Jesus Christ to found his church. Jesus 
Christ, in turn, gave power to Peter to govern the church. 
Peter went to Rome and established the church in that city 
and gave to his successor in the bishopric of that church, for 
all time, the powers of government in and over the church. 
The various bishops of the various churches derived, each 
his authority, not from the people, but from God through 
Christ and then through Peter and the Apostles. The peo- 
ple might designate whom they would like to have for their 
bishop, but they could never make him their bishop. Before 
he could exercise that office he must receive power and au- 
thority from God, through Christ, from Peter as the Vicar 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 255 

of Christ, and the Apostles; through the laying on of hands 
by the bishops, who conveyed the electric current of power 
and authority down the line. This theory laid down by Cyp- 
rian established itself by force of circumstances and is to this 
day the theory of all churches claiming to be apostolic. It 
is the theory of the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches, — 
which differ from one another only as to the share which the 
other apostles have with Peter in the possession and exercise 
of this delegated authority; Rome says they have none, the 
Greek and the Anglican deny this, and say that the apostles 
share and share alike in this gift of authority. This doctrine 
is destructive of unity. Rome has the logic of the theory; 
hence Rome prevails. But wherever this theory is held, 
whether in Rome, Oxford, or Moscow, the status of God is 
the same. God is the absolute ruler of the church and, 
through the church, of the world. By a carefully arranged 
machinery he appoints the officers of the church who are to 
rule both church and world. When a man is once a bishop 
he is so by divine right ; he is not the servant of the people, 
he is the Vicar of God. This is not only true of the pope or 
the bishop, but of every officer of the church down to the 
last little priestling ordained by the bishop. 

It was to the establishment of this theory that St. Augustine 
dedicated his great genius : he saw in the fall of Rome the 
opportunity of God. God could now reign in Rome in the 
person of his Vicar. The imperialistic conception of God, 
which was held by Augustine in common with the Roman 
lawyers, separated God from the people. God was the sov- 
ereign, the people were the subjects; it was for God to com- 
mand, for the people to obey. God was majesty, might, and 
power, the people must bow before his majesty, tremble at 
his might, and suffer the exercise of his power. The God of 
Augustine has nothing of the vacillation of Jehovah ; he does 
not repent that he made man because man is wicked, — God 
made man to be wicked, that in the punishment of that 
wickedness God might be glorified. Nor has the God of 
Augustine anything of the vagueness of the Greek Father- 
God, who can do nothing except through the Son. 



256 THE WAYS OP THE GODS 

With Augustine God is God, and that is the end of the mat- 
ter. What God wants to do God can do, — and God does do. 
He is the Absolute sovereign, Nothing happens without his 
will ; we are what we are, we do what we do, we suffer what 
we suffer, all in accordance with the will of God. This con- 
ception of God was congenial to the Roman mind. If one 
asks why this is so, the answer is: It is the will of God. Why 
am I sick? It is the will of God. Why am I poor? It is 
the will of God. Why am I in prison? It is the will of God. 
God is personal will enthroned in the universe, commanding 
the universe. 

It is this imperial God who rules in the Catholic church 
through his vicar, the pope, who rules in every diocese through 
his vicar, the bishop, and in every parish church through his 
vicar the priest. There is nothing indefinite here ; God is 
God, and there is none beside him. This is God's vicar, his 
word is law. God is in his holy temple, let all the earth 
keep silence before him. I, his Pope, his bishop, his priest, 
speak in his name. Listen and obey. 



CHAPTER LIII 

God Almighty: Creator of Heaven and Hell 

Augustine, in common with all the doctors of the church, 
accepted the Hebrew Scriptures as of divine inspiration and 
authority, they were the very word of God, expressing his 
will. But Augustine did what every one must do ; he in- 
terpreted those writings in the light of his own genius to ac- 
commodate them to the conditions of his own time and place. 
In the Hebrew Scriptures Jehovah is the creator of the heav- 
ens and the earth. In the scheme of creation the earth oc- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 257 

cupied the central position as the scene of the activities of 
Jehovah. The heavens ministered to the earth. 

In the days when the Hebrew Scriptures were written, 
man was of the earth, earthy. On the earth man's life was 
lived, in the earth man rested after his life was over. Man 
was not yet capable of aspiring to any other life than the life 
that he lived as a denizen of the earth. The Hebrew writers 
had in their minds no such conception as we hold when we 
speak of heaven. The Hebrew did not think of himself as 
personally immortal. The only immortality that he craved 
was the immortality of the tribe. Israel was to live forever 
and keep Jehovah's name alive in the earth. There were no 
mansions in the skies that Israel coveted ; his heart was de- 
voted to his own land, with its vines and its fig trees. His 
desire was for length of days. He that would live long and 
see good days must eschew evil and do good ; must seek 
peace and ensue it. Length of days was the reward of virtue 
to the Israelite. 

Even after the Hebrew thinkers had assimilated the thought 
of a personal life after death, they still made the earth the 
scene of that life's activities. The resurrection from the dead 
was a resurrection to and a renewal of the earthly life. Jer- 
usalem glorified and triumphant ; the Jew the dominant peo- 
ple, with abundance of bread and wine to strengthen and 
make glad his heart was all that the Jew asked of Jehovah. 
That granted, the Jew would sing the Lord's songs in the 
Lord's house until all the world should hear that song and 
praise the name of Jehovah of Hosts. As for a home beyond 
the sky, the Jew never dreamed of such a thing, — nor desired 
it. 

As for hell as described by Christian theology, neither the 
Jew nor the Pagan ever conceived of such a place of torment. 
Hell is the gift of Christianity to humanity. Death was un- 
desirable to the Hebrew and the ancient man in general sim- 
ply because it was the absence of life. This attitude of mind 
is set forth with clearness in the prayer of Hezekiah in Isaiah, 
XXXVIII. The sick king laments his coming death in a 
manner congenial to the belief of his time: 



258 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

I said in the cutting off of my days I shall go to the 
gates of the grave. I am deprived of the residue of my 
years. I said I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord 
in the land of the living. I shall behold man no more 
with the inhabitants of the world. Mine age is departed 
and removed from me as a shepherd's tent. I have cut 
off like a weaver my life ; he will cut me off with pining 
sickness ; from day even to night will thou make an end 
of me. 

Here is regret for departed life but no fear of coming 
horror ; darkness and silence and a life gone out, — and that is 
all. The Hebrew 'did not have even so vague a notion of 
life after death as prevailed quite generally in the Gentile 
world ; a life of semi-consciousness in the grave, dependent 
for what little satisfaction there was in it upon the remem- 
brance and ministration of the living. But as for a life after 
death of exquisite happiness or of exquisite misery it never 
entered his mind. Heaven and hell were undiscovered coun- 
tries to the ancient Hebrew mind. 

These regions were brought into view by the Christian 
theologians and their topography was very largely the work 
of the Roman lawyers. To Augustine, more than to any 
other man, is owing those clear outlines of heaven and hell, 
— especially of hell, — which have made these places such 
realities to the Christian mind- In Augustine's time men 
were like Caius Cassius, "aweary of the world". 

The earth had lost its charm. Men living in cities, as 
did Augustine, had ceased to be familiar with the gods of 
the countryside ; they were not refreshed by the waters of 
Arethusa, nor did they walk in the light of Artemis. 

We must never forget that Christianity was a religion of 
the city; it made little or no headway in the country. So 
much was this the case that those that were not Christians 
in the days of Augustine were called Pagans, or countrymen- 

And city life with its corrupt politics and its licentious 
society had become an abomination to the Christian. To 
him the world was very evil, its times were waxing late. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 259 

This earth instead of being the principle scene of the acti- 
vities of God and man, was but an episode, lying between 
heaven and hell. Man's life on the earth was under a curse; 
instead of being the home of man it was his place of banish- 
ment. God was not in the earth, he was in heaven, and only 
by leaving earth could a man gain admittance to the presence 
of God- So that to this day we say of a man who has died, 
that he has gone to his God ; as if when alive he was not 
with his God. 

In this scheme of Augustine, God is not Jehovah, Creator 
of heaven and earth ; he is God Almighty, Creator of heaven 
and hell. Heaven is his throne-room, hell is his dungeon. 
His throne-room was thronged with his subjects, his dun- 
geon was crowded with his enemies. God created for his 
own purposes both heaven and hell- 
In the days of Augustine what was left of the Roman 
Empire, decrepit and senile, was, in the person of its em- 
peror, rapidly assuming the guise of an Oriental despotism. 
All of the simplicity of the Republic and of the early Empire 
was gone. The emperor, — instead of living, as did Augustus 
Caesar, in his own house as a simple citizen, coming 
and going as any private man, plain in his dress, austere 
in his habit, — lived in a palace of a thousand rooms, 
thronged with eunuchs, crowded with sycophants, the scene 
of license and luxury; the emperor himself secluded and 
worshipped as a god. Clothed in purple, crowned with gold, 
seated on ivory, he received the obeisance of the people. 
The meanest and the greatest were on equality when they 
were in the presence of the emperor- Etiquette banished 
simplicity, so that life in the palace of the Caesar was bur- 
densome, dangerous, and tedious; he who came into that pal- 
ace must come richly clothed. A frown on the face of the 
emperor meant death. If the emperor smiled the man must 
smile and stand just so. When Constantine removed the 
seat of empire from Rome to Byzantium and built there 
his new Rome, which was called after his name, Constan- 
tinople, he not only changed the place, he changed the char- 
acter of the capitol city. Rome could never altogether divest 



260 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

herself of the vestiges of her Republican simplicity. Con- 
stantinople had no such past- She entered at once upon that 
career of luxury and despotism which has been her experience 
ever since. 

So it was with God. When Jehovah removed hisxcapitol 
city from earth to heaven, he not only changed the place, he 
changed the character of his divinity. As long as he dwelt 
in Jerusalem God could not rid himself altogether of the asso- 
ciations of the desert; the grit of the sand is in his hair, the 
tan of the desert is on his cheek, the smell of the sheep-fold 
clings to his garments. He is a god who has know r n hard- 
ships ; he has sat cross-legged in the door of Abraham's 
tent- Such was the god Jehovah, and even Jerusalem could 
not rob him of his rusticity. But when he becomes God 
Almighty, and has removed his capitol city from earth to 
heaven, then all this simplicity is gone and in its place is a 
meritricious, Oriental, despotic court. God sits on his 
throne, Cherubim and Seraphim veil their face before him; 
the whole atmosphere is laden with the fulsome praises of 
His Majesty- God exists only to be praised. His own hap- 
piness and glory is his single thought. If we may believe 
the theologians, God created man simply to praise Him. Any 
slightest thought of criticism of His Divine Majesty is pun- 
ished with banishment from heaven to the torments of hell. 
Lucifer, son of morning, falls from heaven because he will 
not bow before the Great White Throne. 

This conception of God and heaven is Constantinopoli- 
tanism pure and simple; it has been the ideal both of Caesar 
and Sultan from the foundation of that city to this day- 
And it is upon this conception that Western Christendom has 
fed its imagination for nearly two thousand years. 

As in the palace of the Duke of Ferrara, the dungeon foul 
and dark and filthy was under the banquet room, so it was 
in the city of God. The fires of hell were raging under- 
neath the golden streets of the new Jerusalem. 

Only a decadent and dying civilization could have given 
birth to any such conception as the Christian hell; that 
conception has in it a refinement of cruelty, possible only 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 261 

to a depraved mind, and the mind of Augustine, great as 
it was, was depraved. It could not help being depraved ; it 
was born, lived, and died in an atmosphere of depravity. 
For centuries the Roman had steeped his soul in cruelty. 
What to us would be shocking beyond endurance was to him 
a matter of every day occurrence. Augustine's conception 
of hell was born of the cruelties of the empire. God, in 
his conception, is more cruel than Nero : for Nero did not 
create his victims, and he could only burn them for an hour 
at the most. God did create his victims, and he could burn 
them through eternity- 
Augustine devotes two chapters, — Chapter XXI and Chap- 
ter XXII, — of "The City of God" to prove that God can, by 
his creative power, keep a human body of flesh and blood 
and bone and nerve alive through all eternity in order that 
he may burn it in the fires of his wrath. Beyond this, a 
conception of cruelty cannot go. 

As the king punishes treason with the greatest severity, 
so God visits heresy and schism, which are acts of treason 
against the City of God, with a penalty beyond the punish- 
ment of adultery and murder. For the heretic the fires of hell 
burn hotter than for the common criminal. Soon after the 
time of Augustine, the church, that she might be pleasing 
to her Lord, entered upon that career of cruelty which is 
one of the darkest blots on the pages of human history. 
The church in all its branches would gladly forget these 
passages in her history. But the student can never forget; 
these transactions have singed and charred the very nerves 
of human race memory; so that at the thought of them the 
soul winces. From the day when the monks of Alexandria 
stripped the beautiful and gifted Hypatia naked and scraped 
her quivering flesh from her bones with shells to the day 
when Henry VIII and his priests burned Anne Askew in the 
fire; from the days when the priests of Rome burned Gior- 
dano Bruno in the Piazza del Fiore to the days when the 
priests of England heaped scorn on the head of the venerable 
Darwin, more cruel deeds have been done in the name of 
God Almighty than I, for one, would care, if I were God, to 



262 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

be responsible for. Well did Jesus say: "He that killeth 
you will think he doeth God service." 

It is to be said for primitive and pure Christianity that 
this conception was foreign to its mind. As long as the 
religion was in the keeping of the working class it did not 
easily lend itself to such extremes. The mind of the early 
church was tender toward suffering as having itself suffered. 
It remembered the prayer of its Founder for his persecutors 
and in its hour of agony it prayed for surcease of pain. 

This notion of hell we owe to the Roman lawyer; and the 
law is always cruel- Human government has, until very 
recently, been (and, in a measure, is even now) based on 
fraud and violence ; it is haunted by fear and buttressed by 
punishment ; its safeguards are the dungeon and the gibbet. 
It knows nothing of the love that casts out all fear and walks 
defenseless as Daniel into the den of the lions. Man is for 
the most part like Robespierre : he can think of government 
only as a killing. Here is a woman who is suspected of in- 
civism ; what shall we do with her? Send her to the guil- 
lotine ! Here is a man whose patriotism is shady ; what shall 
we do with him? Send him to the guillotine! So it was all 
day long, — to the guillotine ! to the guillotine ! to the guil- 
lotine ! — until Robespierre has guillotined all that was virtuous 
and noble in France and then comes, himself, under the axe. 

But alas, and alack a day ! that we should have ascribed such 
stupidity to our God ! Here is a woman who differs from 
your priests in her teaching; what shall we do with her? 
Torture her and send her to hell- Here is a man whose 
orthodoxy is in doubt; what shall we do with him? Oh, 
burn him and send him to hell! Here is a nation that has 
never heard of your plan of salvation ; what shall we do with 
it? Oh, just send it to hell; until hell is all peopled by the 
noblest souls that ever breathed the breath of human life. 

All this is so stupid that it is ridiculous, and the wonder 
is that men could ever have been so crassly idiotic in their 
minds. The Christian world owes a profound apology to the 
so-called heathen world for sending all its saints and sages, 
unseen, unheard, to the Christian hell. It was not fair to God 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 263 

nor to the heathen and sage. It was, however, a great com- 
pliment to hell. It makes hell desirable. 

The excuse for all this is that hell is born of a horror for 
sin. But of all the sins of which man can be guilty, cruelty 
is the greatest ; and hell is cruelty deified. 

O my brothers and my sisters, is it not time that you and 
I came out from under our bondage to the Roman lawyer, 
and delivered ourselves and our God from the cruel libel 
which these have laid against him and us? We have no sin 
and can have no sin that deserves eternal torture. God 
Almighty Creator of Heaven and hell never did exist, never 
can exist ! Let us forget him. 



CHAPTER LIV 

The Wrath of God 

In the Augustine scheme, Jesus ben Joseph is not the God 
Christus, worshipped by the common people ; his business is 
not, primarily, to inform them with his wisdom, to win them 
by his tenderness, to lead them in the way of righteousness. 
His relation to the people is subordinated to his relation to 
his God. Jesus did not come into the world to save the world 
by wisdom and by love, he came to save it by his blood. His 
death was not the natural consequence of his course of action 
in antagonizing the priest and scribe; he did not die, as 
Savonarola died, because his life was dangerous to the exist- 
ing order, he was not the victim of man's rage or fear; he 
was the victim of God's wrath. He was the Lamb of God, 
slain from the foundation of the world to take away the sin 
of the world. God was angry with the world because of the sin 
of Adam; Christus, by his death, appeased this anger of God. 

This theory of the nature and office of the Christus has its 
origin far back in the primitive mind of man. It is an in- 



264 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

heritance from the ages of ignorance and fear. Everywhere 
we find primitive man seeking to propitiate his god with 
blood ; human and animal sacrifice prevailed as soon as man 
emerged into the full consciousness of himself and the world 
about him. When he awakened in the garden of Eden, he 
found himself naked and he was ashamed and afraid. He 
heard the voice of his God calling in anger, and he hid him- 
self- That is the parable of man's life from its earliest con- 
sciousness down to the present day. God has always been 
an object of fear. Fear is the motive of worship. Listen to 
the litanies that go up to God from the lips of the priests, 
and are they not appeals for mercy? All through the ages 
man has been as a child afraid of his father. And there was 
reason for it, since in all the early ages the fathers were bitter 
toward their children, — the little ones were visited by the rod 
for every offense. It was a hard thing in those days to be a 
child in a grown-up world. 

Then, as always, man has made God in his own image. Man 
looked on every calamity of his life as the infliction of an 
angry god ; the flood and the drought, the fever and the chill, 
came not in any order of nature, but were the outbreaks of 
the bad temper of the Gods. It is pitiful that, from the first, 
man has thought of the universe and of the gods of the uni- 
verse as unfriendly to him- Have you never passed a house 
at night and heard the falling switch and the cry of the 
tortured child? "Oh, father, don't, don't! I'll be good, I'll be 
good, I'll be good !" And so it is with us, who are but grown- 
up children, when we suffer the slings and arrows of out- 
rageous fortune, we lift up our agonized voices and cry to 
our God: "Father, don't, don't! I'll be good, Til be good!" 

In order to keep the gods in fair temper, men brought to 
them of the firstlings of the flock and the heifer of a year old, 
that the gods might eat of the savory mess and be satisfied 
and pleased. For man said : "A hungry god is an angry 
god ; I'll feed him and keep him in good humor." In the time 
of stress man said : "The god is dainty, he wants better meat 
than this : I will slay for him my first born, I will give the 
fruit of my body for the sin of my soul." Out of this fear of 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 265 

primitive man, out of his conception of the gods as being 
like himself, easily moved to anger when cold and hungry, 
was developed all that vast system of animal sacrifice which 
was the way of man's approach to God in the early stages of 
his religious life. 

As times softened manners and man became less a creature 
of his crude emotions, these butcheries in the temple offended 
his sensibilities and shocked his reason- He saw that the god 
did not eat of the fiesh that was laid on his altar; all of this 
except the offal, was the perquisite of the priest. But few 
men had the temerity to scout the whole system as absurd 
and useless. A Micah here, an Isaiah there, might utter his 
protest, but the custom was hoary, the tradition was sacred, 
and so the temples continued to be slaughter-houses, and priests 
persuaded the people that the gods must be fed with the 
sacrifice, else the gods would be angry. 

It was this primitive conception that Augustine, following 
the lead of Paul, organized into a system of religious doctrine 
and worship and bequeathed as a perpetual heirloom to the 
Christian church. The misery of the world Paul and 
Augustine ascribed to the anger of God at the sin of Adam- 
Adam disobeyed God and turned God against him, and 
not only did Adam suffer from the wrath of God, but his act 
involved the whole race of man down to the last generation. 
Man, by that act of disobedience, became evil in the sight of 
God; sin curdled his blood and depraved his nature. With 
the growth of the conception of life after death man's dis- 
obedience involved not only suffering in this present life but 
eternal misery beyond the grave. 

When one's reason is awake, one stands- amazed in the 
presence of such a conception as this ; it is only because it 
has the sanction of religion that it can endure for a moment 
under the condemnation of the intelligence and the con- 
science. God's abiding wrath on the suffering children of 
men is too horrible to think of- Just think! God angry for 
four thousand years. How I pity him! 

It was necessary that this wrath should be appeased if 
man was ever to escape from his misery. A scheme had 



266 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

already been devised by which this anger of God might be 
turned away from the sinner and fall upon the head of an- 
other. The Priests of the Hebrew religion had worked out 
an elaborate plan whereby the sinner might lay his sin 
upon the head of a victim and so be free. He brought the 
firstling of his flock and laid his hand upon its head and con- 
fessed his sin, and then he killed the lamb and burned it on 
the altar as a propitiatory sacrifice ; and the blood of the 
lamb was the cleansing of his sin- 

Paul took this thought of the Hebrew Rabbi and made 
it basic to Christian theology. The death of Jesus on the 
cross was not the death of a martyr to truth and righteous- 
ness ; it was the death of the Lamb of God, slain to take away 
the sin of the world. In this theory it is not the life, it 
is the death of Jesus that is of supreme importance. He 
does not die to satisfy the demand of his own soul, he dies to 
appease the wrath of God. It is out of this conception that 
the whole scheme of Christian salvation has been evolved. 
Man is saved from the wrath of God by the blood of Jesus. 

If one ask — if one dare ask — why this elaborate scheme was 
necessary to bring about so simple a matter as the for- 
giveness of erring man by his God ; why if God wanted to 
forgive he couldn't just forgive and have done with it, the 
solemn answer is that God's justice must be satisfied before 
his forgiveness can be given. And here we have the root 
of the whole matter. Here we have Plato's Absolute, which 
William James damned, coming to confound us- Justice is 
something which exists in and of itself, apart from God, and 
controls his actions ; God cannot be merciful lest justice be 
offended. Justice must have its victim before mercy can have 
its way. It is this grim justice that has been the occasion of 
the greatest crimes in the human calendar. Justice is the 
great god of the lawyer in whose name the lawyer sends men 
and women to shameful death, shuts human souls away from 
human sympathy in foul dungeons, and makes a felon's cell 
a hell on earth. Justice does not look at the sinner, it only 
looks at the sin- Justice does not protect the people, it only 
guards the portals of the king. Justice has been pictured 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 267 

as a blind woman, holding an even balance ; it should be 
pictured as a grim and gory man holding an axe. Justice in 
this world has never known how to forgive, only how to 
punish. God's justice could be satisfied only with the blood 
of God's Son. 

Under the impulse of this thought the religion of Jesus 
ben Joseph drifted far away from its simplicity ; Jesus was 
a disciple of Isaiah and Micah ; God to him was not anger, 
he was love- The great saying of Micah is the soul of his 
and of all religion : 

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before 
the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves 
of a year old? 

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten 
thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgres- 
sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the 
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk 
humbly with thy God? 

Immortal words! Almost the last words that man can 
speak concerning himself in relation to his God. 

But far too simple to satisfy the sophisticated mind of the 
rabbi and the lawyer. Instead of this direct method we have 
the vast elaborated mediums of the doctor of the law. In 
the scheme of Augustine the City of God is the place for 
safety- Outside the church there is no salvation. Entrance 
to the church is in the keeping of the priests. The church 
lives by offering the sacrifice of Christ as a perpetual offering 
to God. To be saved one must be in the communion of the 
church, and the communion of the church is guarded by its 
doctrines. It was this conception that changed the Christ- 
ian ministry of the earlier period into the priesthood of the 
later age. The City of God took over the ancient temples 
and appropriated the assets of the older gods- The Chief 
priest of the Christian church assumed the privileges and the 
title of the chief priest of Jupiter. He was pontifex maximus 
in the city of Rome. It was by means of this dogma that 



268 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Rome disciplined Europe for a thousand years. It is the 
greatest triumph of pure idealism known to history. This 
idea had no relation whatever to the fact and yet the idea 
was greater than any fact- There was no angry God, yet in 
the name of an angry god Rome ruled the world. 

Rome was successful because, in her early and formative 
period, Rome used this angry God to check the unruly wills 
of men ; he was a bogy with which she frightened the ignor- 
ant. The world was in a welter of confusion ; men could not 
listen to reason or give heed to conscience ; it needed the 
voice of stern ^authority to curb their cruelty and to restrain 
their lust. The belief in an angry God is a useful belief if 
sanely held- Fear is the guardian of virtue when virtue is 
weak. The popes and the priests did do something in the 
way of protecting the weak from the ravages of the strong, 
and men from the violence of their own passions. 

But power such as they possessed cannot be safely en- 
trusted to men. It is no exaggeration to say that this power 
was used for the aggrandizement of the priesthood, for the 
arrest of thought, and for the clouding of the conscience 
Under this system, human life could not be lived simply, 
sweetly, nobly ; it was as if one lived in a house where some 
one was always angry : one dare not speak his mind for fear 
of giving offence- Under this teaching, man became self- 
conscious, he was always saying to himself: "I have a soul to 
save, a God to glorify." 

Is it not time that we dismissed from our minds the 
thought of an angry God appeased by blood? Can we never 
outgrow the terror of our childhood? Must we always think 
of our Father as bearing a rod? 



Book IX 
THE MEDIEVAL GODS 



CHAPTER LV 

The Eclipse of Christus 

The two centuries following the publication by Augustine 
of the "De Civitate Dei" are the most degraded and dis- 
astrous in the life of the Western world. During those cen- 
turies the old civilization died a death of pain and shame. Be- 
fore Augustine passed away, Africa was overrun by the 
Vandals, his own city of Hippo was besieged, and the great 
saint and doctor died praying for a deliverance that never 
came. 

Of all the barbarians from the north who swept down on 
the provinces of the Roman Empire, the Vandals were the 
most ruthless; so ruthless were they that their name has 
become a synonym for wanton destruction. They came like 
locusts on the gardens and orchards of Gaul, Hispania, and 
Africa, and left not a green thing behind. Villages were laid 
waste, cities were obliterated from the map, populations were 
reduced to slavery, and Western Europe, after the Vandal 
invasion, reverted to a barbarism, from which it has not yet 
emerged. The Vandals were of kin to the Franks and the 
Germans, who are even to-day making Europe a place of 
slaughter. 

In the year 475 Odoacer the Goth deprived Romulus 
Augustulus of the imperium, and the Roman Empire ceased 
to exist. Rome, instead of being the mistress of the world, 
was now in the possession of a Gothic chieftain, and Italy 
fell into that condition of discord and disunion from which 
it did not recover until the days of Victor Emmanuel and 
Cavour- 

The City of God survived the disaster of the City of the 
Caesars and, out of the ruins of that city, built for itself a 

271 



272 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

new, a wider, and a greater dominion. The bishop of the city 
of Rome centered in himself all the hopes and fears, all the 
religious devotion and enthusiasm, that had been generated 
[n the hearts of the people by the worship of and the love 
for the God Christus, organizing these hopes and fears, this 
devotion and enthusiasm, into a political machine for the 
control and discipline of Europe. From the day that Rome 
ceased to be imperial, it began to be papal. 

But before the Pope could come to his own, Western 
Europe haxi to pass through centuries of darkness and dis- 
order in which humanity was forgotten and man became once 
more a beast of prey, finding his chief satisfaction in fighting 
and drunkenness. 

But if the condition of the Western Empire was deplorable, 
the condition of Eastern Europe was despicable. The West 
reverted to a barbarism in which there was a promise of life, 
the East sank down into an effete, corrupt, and loathsome 
civilization which could only end in further degradation, de- 
cay, and death. 

The emperors of the East anticipated the career of the 
Sultans : they were emperors of the palace, they were the 
slaves of women, they were exalted and cast down by the 
intrigues of the eunuchs. The Christian religion in the East 
had none of the effectiveness of the church in the West. The 
Patriarch of Constantinople could not compete with the 
Patriarch of Rome. In the West, by the disasters of the 
empire, the church was left free to work out its own career ; 
in the East the church was under the shadow of the palace; 
religion was a function of the State. The bishop of Con- 
stantinople was and must be the obsequious servant of his 
master, the emperor. If he dared to lift up his voice against 
the iniquities of the palace, as did St. John Chrysostom, the 
empress banished him to the savage regions of Mt. Taurus- 
Christianity in the East was not in the keeping of states- 
men, it was the prey of the monks ; and the monks of the 
East were as nasty as hornets and as quarrelsome as spiders. 
Keeping up a perpetual wrangle and jangle over abstruse 
points of doctrine, the warring factions carried their quar- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 273 

rels into the Circus, where the opposing parties had their 
chariots and their colors, and shouted hatred at one another 
from the benches. 

If any institution was ripe for judgment that institution 
was organized Christianity in the East at the beginning of the 
Seventh Century, — and that judgment came. 

In the year 622 occurred that event pregnant with con- 
sequences for the future of Christianity and Europe, known 
as the Hegira of Mahomet. It was in that flight that fate 
flung out into the world a God who, within a century, swept 
into his control Western Asia and Northern Africa, who 
made Spain his province, who confined the Roman Empire of 
the East to the environs of Constantinople, and finally, after 
centuries of conflict, made that city the seat of his sovereignty. 

Mahomet, the prophet of this mighty God, was an Arabian 
camel-driver, who in the course of his travels between Arabia 
and Syria became familiar with Christianity and Judaism ; 
and having a genius for religion, he soon found, by contact 
with higher forms of faith, the crude idolatries of his desert 
tribes ridiculous in the light of his intelligence and repugnant 
to the dictates of his conscience. He could not kiss the 
Black-Stone of Mecca without laughing, nor worship it with- 
out shame- But while the soul of the camel-driver rose above 
the gods of his people, it could not embrace the God of the 
Christians. This keen-eyed Arabian saw at once that God 
could not be any such piece of complicated machinery as 
Christian theology had made him out to be, his simple mind 
rejected the subtleties of the Greek philosopher — its sub- 
stance and its persons had no meaning for him. 

This man of the desert found his god in the Desert — the God 
of the Bene-Israel. With one sweep of his genius he swept 
away all accretions that had gathered in the temple of that 
God and left him nothing but the unity, the austerity, and the 
implacability of the desert. Mahomet reduced religion, as 
far as God is concerned, to the lowest common denominator; 
his creed can be expressed in nine English words : "There is 
one God, and Mahomet is his prophet." Beyond this, sim- 
plicity cannot go. 



274 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Having formulated his faith, Mahomet proceeded to live it. 
He sought his Desert God in desert places; he received from 
his God visions and revelations. He was the camel-driver 
of Khadijah, a wealthy woman of Mecca. His mistress made 
him her husband, and she was his first convert- His love for 
his wife was the stay of the prophet in all the dark hours of 
his early career; when scorn was heaped upon him from 
without, and when doubt weakened his faith within, he re- 
assured himself by saying: ''Khadijah believes in me!" And 
to this day Khadijah shares with Mahomet the veneration of 
the faithful.' 

Having made a few converts in Mecca, Mahomet became 
not only an object of derision but also of hatred. The chief 
men of the city sought to kill him. To escape their wrath, 
Mahomet, with his following, fled by night to the neighboring 
city, Yathrib ; known thereafter as Al Medina, — the City of 
the Prophet- When his enemies came out in force against 
him, he met them on the field of battle and beat them; and 
from that hour the sword of Mahomet preached effectively 
the religion of Mahomet. The wild tribes of the Arabian 
deserts were swept into the new movement as by the magic 
of their god. Fired by the zeal of their new-born faith, they 
rushed out of the desert with the cry of, 'Allah il Allah !" 
(God is God) on their lips, with veneration for the prophet 
Mahomet in their hearts, with the sword of the Lord in their 
hands, and made their own the fairest portions of the earth. 
The birthplace of Christianity was lost forever to Christianity, 
and is to this day in the keeping of the God of Mahomet. 

The God of Mahomet is a god congenial to the souls of 
fighting men, he is the War-God of the Desert, who gives to 
his soldiers the reward of bravery, who soothes their fiery 
souls with the unlimited embraces of women, who gives 
them the spoils of the cities, and if they die fighting, they 
pass at once into the presence of the black-eyed Houri, who 
embrace them under the shade of the palm trees of Paradise- 

This religion threatened for centuries the religion of the 
Christ. It seems but an accident that Europe is to-day 
Christian and not Mahommedan. Western Europe owes its 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 275 

deliverance to the valor of the Franks who, under Charles 
Martel, defeated the Mohammedan invaders on the field of 
Tours, and drove them beyond the Pyrenees, thus saving 
Western Europe to Christianity. 

The simplicity of the religion of Mahomet left the mind 
free to employ its powers in dealing with the facts of life. 
The followers of the Prophet, during the centuries that fol- 
lowed, outstripped the Christians in the sciences, the arts, 
and the amenities of life. They built their cities from Ispahan 
to Granada and made them the centers of learning. To them 
we owe the figures from 1 to 10 which have displaced the 
clumsy numerals of the Latin and made possible the rapid 
calculations necessary to the complications of modern life. 
It is hardly too much to say that, but for the Arabic method 
of numbering, our present industrial civilization could scarce- 
ly have come into existence. 

It was in his conflict with the Saracens that the rude Saxon 
and the Frank were taught the first rudiments of good man- 
ners, — Saladin was the teacher of Cceur de Lion. The wars 
of the Crusaders did not recover the Holy Land, but they 
did bring the enlightenment of the East to the West and made 
possible the passage of the Teutonic people from barbarism 
to civilization. We cannot afford to despise the God of 
Mahomet, as it is to him and his people that we owe so much 
that is useful in our present, civilization, — such as it is. 

The religion of Christus in the East, as a consequence of 
the conquest of Islam, became a subject religion, — a religion 
that existed at the mercy of the Caliph and the Sultan. After 
the conversion of Vladimir the Russ, — who for the sake of 
marrying a princess of Constantinople embraced the Christ- 
ian faith and drove his people into the rivers at the edge of 
the sword to be baptized, — the Eastern church lost all power 
of expansion. It has for centuries lived a sordid, dependent 
life under the rule of the Turk, and has lent itself as the 
plausible instrument of the despotism of the Tsar of Russia- 
It calls itself orthodox ; it worships its creed ; it has not since 
the Seventh Century added to or taken away from its articles 
of faith, it has had saints and doctors, but these have been the 



276 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

saints and doctors of a stagnant religion that has been the 
breeding-place of ignorance and tyranny. Christianity in the 
East has sadly failed to fulfill the promise of its youth. 

In the West it had a more active and honorable career. 
The Roman lawyers organized Christianity into a vast politi- 
cal machine for the government of Western Europe. 

There is not in all history anything more marvelous than 
the rise of the Bishop of Rome to the political mastership 
of Western Europe- Beginning as the overseer of a little 
band ob slaves, thieves, and harlots in the Trastevere, hiding 
from the wrath of the emperor in the darkness of the cata- 
combs, he rose step by step from this lowliness and obscurity 
to be for centuries the most considerable personage in 
Europe, until he conld compel an emperor to wait for three 
days barefooted in the snows (as did Henry of Germany, at 
Canossa, to get the pardon of Gregory VII), and until Charles 
of Hungary and Charles, King of Naples, led the horse of 
Boniface VIII on the day that he assumed the triple crown 
of the Pope. 

The exaltation of the Pope was due to the fact that he 
succeeded to the spiritual eminence of Jesus and to the 
political supremacy of Csesar. Before the Pope could be 
pope Jesus had to die on the cross and Caesar had to triumph 
on the field of Pharsalus. It was the Pope's advantage that 
he was at the place where these two streams of personal in- 
fluence met and mingled- 

Jesus had thrown the spell of his spiritual genius over 
the Western world ; he had entered the womb of the West 
and impregnated it with a new life ; he had revealed to man 
the soul of man. He had made human life to consist not in 
the abundance of things a man possessed, but in intregrity 
and purity of soul. He had made life the common and equal 
possession of all men, rich and poor, high and low alike, — only 
the poor had the advantage of the rich, in that they were not, 
burdened with the baggage of life. Jesus inspired the mass 
of the people with hope and gave enthusiasm to humanity. 
These riches of Christ came into the keeping of the Pope as 
th Q overseer of the Christian Church in Rome- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 277 

Just as Jesus was the greatest spiritual genius of the race, 
so was Caesar the greatest political genius. Caesar was not 
a brilliant conqueror as was Alexander, nor was he a vulgar 
conqueror as was Gengis Khan ; he was primarily a politi- 
cian, a statesman, an organizer. All the wars of Caesar were 
wars of policy. He saw the civilized world falling into ruin 
through the powerlessness of the Roman oligarchy to govern 
the world it had conquered. He swept that oligarchy out of 
his way and reorganized the Roman world, centering all 
authority in himself and making of the republic of Rome an 
empire, and thereby so casting the spell of the name and 
power of Imperial Rome over the imaginations of men that 
to this day his name is the synonym of political supremacy. 

When the empire of Rome fell, the ghost of that empire 
haunted Europe for ten centuries, — indeed, it still stalks 
abroad in the guise of the Roman Church. When Constantine 
removed the seat of the empire from Rome to Byzantium 
he did not remove the empire. The empire was not so much 
an outward fact as it was a spiritual conception ; the people 
could no more conceive of a world without an emperor than 
they could conceive of a heaven without a god. 

It was this that gave the Pope his opportunity ; in the ab- 
sence of the emperor he was the most considerable personage 
in Rome, and not only in Rome but in Italy- In the Christian 
dogmatic he had a means of disciplining the people that no 
other possessed. Almost in spite of himself, he was com- 
pelled to reorganize Europe. A double portion of the spirit 
of Caesar seems to have fallen upon him. He became to all 
intents and purposes God on earth. At his excommunication 
men's lives were blasted and at his interdict whole nations 
thrown into terror and despair. He separated the clergy from 
the laity by the rule of celibacy and made of the clergy a force 
to elevate the church and depress the people. More and more 
the Pope centered the power of the church in himself, he was 
both Christ and Caesar, — though more Caesar than Christ. 

As the Pope became more and more powerful Caesar 
eclipsed Christ and the Pope was worshipped as Divus Caesar, 



278 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the God of the Organization. And it is so even to this day, — 
in the Catholic Church the Pope is carried aloft to receive 
the adoration of the people. The jubilee of the bishop is 
celebrated with pomp and ceremony. The Catholic Church 
has succeeded in substituting itself for God as the object of 
worship ; the Catholic Church is the clergy, and the clergy is 
the Pope. 

And so it has come to pass that Joshua ben Joseph, — 
Jesus the Christus of God, — is to-day in the East hardly more 
than an article of the creed, and in the West the motive power 
of a vast political machine. For centuries he has been in 
eclipse, — creed and church hiding him from the eyes of the 
people. But the day of his emergence is at hand. 



CHAPTER LVI 

Mary: The Goddess of Consolation 

When the Sun is in eclipse the Moon is seen in the sky. 
The philosophers and the lawyers had so obscured the light 
and the love of Jesus ben Joseph that the eyes of men could 
not see by that light nor could men warm themselves in the 
heat of that love. Man can no sooner worship the Second 
Person of an Adorable Trinity than he can worship the 
hypotenuse of a triangle. Mathematicians may adore the 
hypotenuse, philosophers may bow down before the Second 
Person, but the common man stands, bewildered and lost, in 
the presence of these divinities, — he can make nothing of 
them. These do not satisfy his craving for worship, and he 
turns from them to gods more congenial to his mind and 
nature. 

The consequence of the super-exaltation of the Christus 
was the influx of a multitude of minor divinities. Man had 
been too long used to the gods of the fireside, of the field, and 
of the city street to content himself with an abstract god far 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 279 

away from his home, his land and his city. As the average 
man is incurably polygamous, so he is incurably polytheistic: 
he can no more center his thoughts on one god than he can 
center his desires on one woman. This fact may be ignored 
in the interest of theology and morality, but it is a fact with 
which theology and morality has had to deal from the time 
man emerged from the horde until the present day. When 
Christianity became the religion of the multitude it could no 
longer protect the Absolute unity nor the stainless purity 
of its god; it had to give the people gods after their own 
kind, else the people would forsake the church and turn again 
to the gods of the countryside. In the Seventh and Eighth 
Centuries the church compromised with paganism ; while 
maintaining the Absolute Tri-unity of its great gods, it ad- 
mitted minor gods into the sacred precincts of the church and 
permitted them to receive divine honors- 

The church was forced to this compromise by the pressure 
of the people, who would have gods of their own making, in 
spite of the objection of the lawyer and the philosopher. So 
the old gods came back with a rush. They had changed their 
names, they had been recast in the mold of the new religion, — 
had lost their beauty and their joyance. Simon Stylites on a 
pillar was a poor substitute for Mercury lighting on a heaven- 
kissing hill ; but Simon and his co-gods were there, receiving 
the adoration of the multitude. The martyrs and the con- 
fessors became the minor gods of the church, and there were 
enough of them to go around, so that every man could have 
a god of his own choosing. The iconic age returned, and 
images of the saints stood in the niches of the Christian 
churches just as the statues of the gods had been wont to 
stand in the niches of the heathen temples. All this was in 
accord with the principle that revolutions always return upon 
themselves. Progress is a process of chain-making; revolu- 
tions, returning on themselves, make link within link, and so 
the chain lengthens. 

These minor gods of the Christian church were endowed 
with all the attributes of divinity necessary to make them 
useful and sufficient gods in the daily life of the people. They 



280 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

could heal the sick, they could give sight to the blind and 
hearing to the deaf, they could pardon sin and secure to their 
patrons the blessings of eternal life. Because of the power 
of these divinities, the medieval Christian lived in an atmos- 
phere of what we call the supernatural. The supernatural 
was his world. He knew no nature with its impersonal laws, 
acting inevitably and without regard to the whim or wish of 
man. The world to him was in the keeping of the saints who 
could withhold or send the rain, who could visit with the 
plague or take the plague away. Miracle to him was not the 
unusual ; it was the usual- The miracles recorded in the lives 
of the saints make the miracles of the Old and New Testa- 
ment look like second best. Saint Maur could walk on the 
water with more ease than Jesus ; the bones of St. Thomas 
could quicken the dead to a resurrection other than his own, 
and St. Anthony of Padua could spy out the hiding-place of 
lost valuables with more than the omniscience of Christus. 
The history of the medieval man proves conclusively that 
man does not live in the actual world but in a world of his 
own making- We each inhabit a world that has been created 
for us by our own thought. 

The medieval period has been called the age of faith ; it 
should be called the age of credulity. True faith can only be 
based on knowledge. The Middle Age was an age of ignor- 
ance. The men had no knowledge upon which they could 
base a sane belief; they had no faith, — they could have no 
faith,— in the order of nature, because they were ignorant of 
nature ; for them there was no nature with its play and inter- 
play of forces. They had no such sense as we have in the 
security of the operations of nature. They were the victims 
of capricious beings, whose actions were as uncertain as a 
child's: saints helped them, devils hindered them. In the 
day they might meet a saint and receive his blessing, in the 
night ghosts haunted the darkness and goblins sat upon the 
foot of their beds. The saints themselves might at any mo- 
ment turn sour and slap a man in the face. 

The medieval age was an age of cold and darkness and 
fear- Murder and rapine were the order of the day. The 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 281 

Vandal and the Hun rode shrieking through Europe, pillag- 
ing, burning, killing, and the Vandal and the Hun were fol- 
lowed by the Saxon and the Dane. Cities and lonely castles, 
— with their forbidding walls, with their moat and portcullis, 
— were the gathering-places of frightened men and women 
and children. It is lovely to read about the Middle Age, but, 
I trow, it would have been uncomfortable to live in it. The 
Ninth Century was the midnight of the darkness and confu- 
sion of Europe which followed upon the overthrow of the 
Roman Empire by the barbaric invasion. It was at that 
time that men fled for protection and consolation to the 
Bosom of the Mother of God- 

The exaltation of Mary to the rank of the greater divinities 
was the demand of a time when no male god could comfort 
the soul of the people. The Middle Age was an age of child- 
hood, it needed a mother's love more than it needed a father's 
care. The childishness of the age is seen in its nervousness, 
in its capriciousness, in its emotional instability. Like chil- 
dren, it was afraid of the dark and easily moved to tears. The 
men fought and drank like children, without regard to con- 
sequences, and when their fighting and their drinking brought 
them headaches and bloody noses, they ran to Mother Mary 
for comfort; just as children run to mother when they have 
a bruise or an ache. The Middle Age was a childish age, 
and therefore it was a woman's age, — for women are the 
natural protectors of children. The priests who ruled Europe 
in the Middle Age were as much women as men, they were 
asexual, they were beardless, they wore petticoats. In deal- 
ing with the rude baron they practiced the guile of the woman ; 
they did not exercise the strength of the man. 

The childishness of the age is seen in the extravagance, 
the violence, and the instability of its emotions- The Crusad- 
ers march through Syria and leave behind them cities in 
ashes, fields wasted, murdered men, and ravished women; but 
when they come to the Mount of Olives, and see Jerusalem, 
they burst into tears. The flagellants go naked to the waist 
through the streets of the city and flog themselves until the 
blood runs, and then laugh like maniacs at their own folly. 



282 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The architecture of the Middle Age is childish. We say of 
the Gothic Cathedral : "It is a dream !" and so it is, — the 
dream of a child. It is the outcome of aspiration without ex- 
perience. The character of Gothic architecture in comparison 
with the classic is set forth so truly and so quaintly by 
Brother Copas in the story of Quiller-Couch that I will let 
Brother Copas be my spokesman. 

It is upon the question of restoring the cathedral that 
Brother Copas speaks his mind ; addressing the bishop he 
says-: 

"My Lord, when a Hellene built a temple to his god he took 
two pillars, set them upright in the ground and laid a third 
block of stone a-top of them. He might repeat this operation 
a few times or a-many, according to the size at which he 
wished to build. He might carve his pillars and flourish them 
off with acanthus capitals and run friezes along his archi- 
traves, but always in these three stones, the two upright and 
the beam, the trick of it resided, and his building lasted. The 
pillars stood firm in solid ground into which the weight of the 
crossbeam pressed them yet more firmly. The whole struc- 
ture was there to endure, if not forever, at least until some 
ass of a fellow came along and kicked it down to spite the 
old religion; because he had found a new one. But this 
Gothic — this cathedral — which it seems we must help to pre- 
serve, is fashioned only to kick itself down." 

"It aspires" [said the bishop]. 

"Precisely, My Lord, that is the mischief; when the Greek 
temple was content to repose upon natural law, when the 
Greek builder said : T will build for my gods greatly yet 
lowly, measuring my efforts to the powers of man, which at 
their fullest I know to be moderate, making my work harmon- 
ious with what little it is permitted me to know' — in jumps 
the rash Christian saying, with the men of Babel : 'Go to, 
let us build tis a city and a tozuer zvhose top may reach unto 
heaven/ or in other words, let us soar above the laws of earth 
and take the kingdom of heaven by storm. With what re- 
sult? 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 283 

Sed quid Typhoeus et Vilidus Mimas 
Contra sonantem Palladis cegida? 

The Gothic builders, like the Titans, might strain to pile 
Pelion on Olympus — vis consilii expers, my Lord, from the 
moment they take down their scaffolding; nay, while it is 
yet standing, the dissolution begins. All their complicated 
structure of weights, counter-weights, thrusts and balances, 
has started an internecine conflict, stone wearing against 
stone, the whole disintegrating." 1 

So much for Brother Copas. When I stood in that wilder- 
ness of stone, the nave of Yorkminster, I did not wonder that 
Cromwell used it to stable his horses ; when I stood on the 
roof of the Milan cathedral, with its forest of pinnacles, I 
said : "Here is childish conceit gone mad-" 

The intellectual life of the Middle Age was as childish as 
was its artistic. The writings of the schoolmen are a marvel 
of futility. Children always talk confidentially of that of 
which they know nothing. Fact is to them non-existent, 
they live in a world of fancy ; their world is a world of lions 
and bears and giants and Indians and cowboys. The medieval 
man knew nothing of the earth upon which he lived, his 
knowledge of its geography was grotesque to laughter ; but 
this did not faze him. Knowing nothing of the earth, he 
proceeded to map out the topography of heaven and hell with 
the minuteness of a specialist; having not the slightest ac- 
quaintance with the workings of his own mind, he read the 
mind of God like a book. He played at thinking as children 
play at telling endless stories, without point or purpose. 

The intellectual product of the Middle Age lies in our libra- 
ries as dead as is the mummy of Rameses in the British 
Museum. The mind of the Middle Age thinker was as active 
as a squirrel in a cage; like the squirrel, it simply ran and ran 
without getting anywhere- Scholasticism is a byword for in- 
tellectual futility. 

'"Brother Copas," A. T. Quiller-Couch, Scribner & Son, 1911. 



284 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Childish in its knowledge, the Middle Age was in great fear 
where no fear was. Its awful bogy was the second coming 
of Christ. It expressed this fear in the exquisite poetry of 
the "Dies Irae." The souls of the people were kept in con- 
stant alarm, the thought of Christ was fearful ; he was the 
judge, stern and awful. The frightened children fled from 
him to find protection in the merciful arms of his Mother. 

This view of Christ and Mary in relation to the last judg- 
ment is set forth in Michaelangelo's cartoon of that event 
on,the east wall of the Sistine Chapel ; God the Father sits in 
the upper cirro. — serene, self-satisfied; in the lower sky Jesus 
is to his right and Mary to his left, the dead are rising from 
their graves, Christ, with angry brow and uplifted hand, is 
beating them down to hell ; Mary, with arms stretching down- 
ward, is lifting them up to heaven. This is the sum of the 
Middle Age religion ; a religion of fear soothed by a woman. 

Puvis de Chavannes has caught the spirit of the age in 
his wonderful cartoon on the walls of the Pantheon in Paris, 
showing St. Genevieve watching over the city. Paris is the 
prey of fear, men and women crouch in her wattle huts under 
the shadow of her cathedral, in terror of the death that lurks 
in the darkness; the Northmen are abroad at night and the 
wolves are howling over the dead that they leave behind. 
There is no hope save in the saints, so St. Genevieve stands 
in the battlements of Xotre Dame, watching over sleep- 
ing Paris that owes its safety, not to the valor of its men, 
but to the piety and the prayers of its women. 

It was in this age that Mary, Mother of God, Mother of 
Sorrows, Goddess of Consolation, attained to the rank of the 
Greater Divinities- She became in reality the incarnation of 
the Holy Spirit of Comfort, the Third Person in the Adorable 
Trinitv. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 285 

CHAPTER LVII 
The Exploitation of the Gods 

Some three-and-thirty years ago it was my privilege to 
cross the Atlantic Ocean and make my first visit to England. 
I was then in the freshness of my young manhood and in the 
full flush of romanticism. I was the worshipper of Scott and 
the disciple of Newman. While I was yet a lad Scott 
charmed me away from the prosaic surroundings of my West- 
ern home and made me walk with him in countries strange 
and far away. I sat up all night reading his romances, and 
steeped my soul in the spirit of that pseudo-Middle Age 
which he created by the witchery of his genius for the delight 
and the deceiving of generations of confiding youth. For 
nearly twenty years he compelled me to live in his Middle 
Age, to take his Bois Guilbert and his Rowena, his knights 
and priests, his castles and his monasteries, for real knights 
and priests, for real castles and monasteries. Great is the 
power of genius, that can take the dust of ages and reform 
it and make it seem as if it were alive ! 

Under the influence of Scott and Mrs- Porter, I spent all 
my thinking, dreaming hours in the company of men in armor 
and of women in white samite. As I walked alone, I de- 
claimed at the top of my voice: "Scots wha'ha'wi'Wallace 
bled !" I was a youth in the Middle Age. 

It was, then, as a medievalist, the child of Scott, the dis- 
ciple of Newman, that I crossed the waters. I had a mind to 
make a tour of the cathedral cities of England. 

I went by the way of Greenough. Landing early in the 
afternoon, I took a train for Glasgow, and from thence went 
immediately to Edinburgh. When I reached the city of 
Scott it was evening", and the sun was going down. I came 
out from the railway station into Princess street and I feel still, 
in my old age, the thrill of joy that swept over me as I looked 
across the Ravine and saw the Castle, its flags flying, and 
heard the pibroch. I was at home at last, — in the land of 



286 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

my dreams ! This was my beloved Middle Age right before 
my eyes. While I looked the sun went down, and after din- 
ner, — taken, not in the Middle-Age Inn but, to my disgust, 
in a modern hotel, — I went out and walked up and down 
Princess Street during the long twilight of an August night 
until the darkness came, pacing to and fro, my eyes on the 
Castle, as if I were a sentinel on guard. 

A visit to the Castle rather chilled my ardor : the soldiers 
were not heroic figures. As I went about the Old Town I 
saw such poverty, such drunkenness, such misery that my 
worship for the past was lost in pity and horror for the 
present. 

One who has not seen the old town of Edinburgh on a 
Saturday night as it was thirty years ago has not seen an 
exhibition of drunkenness, squalidness, and misery that made 
the city of Scott an unromantic chamber of horrors. 

Leaving Edinburgh, I reached Durham in the night and 
w r ent early in the morning to visit the cathedral. From the 
very first I suffered a shock of disappointment- I said: "Is 
this a cathedral?" Somehow, it did not answer to the vision 
of my soul. The first impression was that of bigness, the 
second of uselessness. 

I went into it, and the Verger showed me around, for 
which service I paid him a shilling. 

Durham is not one of the larger cathedrals, but its inter- 
ior would hold all the people of Durham and to spare. It 
stood there on the hill, looking over the city, a monument 
to the Middle Age- Its keynote, as I studied it, was exag- 
geration ; I began to think of it not so much as a work of art 
as an economic waste. Were the people of the Middle Age 
so well housed that they could afford to build so expensively 
for their God? And then I remembered that in the Middle 
Age the people lived in wattle huts, without windows, with- 
out comforts,— cold, hungry, and afraid. I learned that the 
building of this cathedral exhausted the labor of the neigh- 
borhood for nearly two centuries. Each bishop vied to outdo 
his predecessor in the extravagance of his building. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 287 

Near the cathedral was the castle of the Baron and the 
palace of the Bishop, and I began to bethink me of what 
the Middle Age was in reality; it was not a page in "Ivanhoe," 
it was not a glamour of silver armor and silken sheen, it was 
not royal knight and lady, it was an age of darkness, dirt, 
and disorder, — an age in which the gods and the people were 
exploited to enrich the barons and the bishops. 

When I visited Yorkminster this impression was intensi- 
fied. If ever there was madness in stone, it is Yorkminster. 
Here is vastness to no purpose, human effort wasted, — build- 
ing a house for God so big that any reasonable god would 
be lost in it! 

Accidentally I was locked up in the chapter room of the 
Minster for two hours while the verger was taking tea ; I 
spent the time studying the faces on the heads in which the 
ribs of the roof terminated. Such grotesqueries, — fingers 
in the mouth, face drawn awry, mouth wide open, chin and 
nose meeting, — it was as if the monks who carved these 
heads were laughing at their own folly, taking revenge upon 
themselves for their lack of reason. 

As I visited cathedral town after cathedral town I saw 
these three buildings: the cathedral, the castle (old or new), 
and the palace, — always the palace. I saw the cathedral 
close, with deaneries and canonries snug and comfortable, and 
I said to myself: "The gods were profitable to the clergy in 
the good old days; if I could choose my lot I'd be, me lud, 
bishop in the days when the bishops exploited the gods for 
all the gods were worth." 

In that visit to England my romanticism received a shock 
from which it never recovered. 

Four years later I visited the Continent and in every city 
I found the Middle Age represented by the cathedral, the 
castle, and the palace, until at last I came to Rome and stood 
in the Piazza San Pietro, where I saw that great age come 
to its culmination in St. Peter's and the Vatican. St- Peter's 
is so vast that it looks small ; the eye fails to take it in, it is 
just like all-out-of-doors. The palace of the Vatican, the 
home of the Pope, with its eleven thousand rooms, is a city 



THE WAYS OF PHB GODS 

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TIM*] WAYS OV THE GODS 280 

Any one visiting Rome and the altars of the Apostles in that 
year would receive, a1 the Pope's hands, full indulgence and 
pardon for all liis sins. To secure so great a blessing mul- 
titudes came from all parts of Europe to the lloly City; as 
many as two hundred thousand pilgrims were in Koine at a 
given time, crowding the Churches, and attendants, armed with 
rakes, gathered in the COpper, silver, and gold coin that Cell 
like hail at the hase of the altars. The jubilee heeame an 
institution; first occurring every hundred years, then every 
fifty, then whenever a Tope was in need of money. It was 
an easy and delightful way of getting rid of one's sins, and 

the people 4 came to avail themselves of the privilege. They 
could have a ^ood time coming and a good time going and 

save their souls by the way. 

The last and most elegant of the beneficiaries of this 

system of conscious exploitation was none other than Giovan- 
ni de Medici, known to history as Leo X- Giovanni dc Medici 
was the second son i)\ Lorenzo the Magnificent. The interest 

of his father made him a cardinal at nineteen. The letters 

of Lorenzo in relation to the elevation of his son are curious 
revelations of the state o{ politics and morality in Italy in 
the Fifteenth Century. Talk about graft! Why, our grafters 

are sucking children beside these men of the Italian Renais- 
sance. Cur grafters exploit the people; these men exploited 

the gods,— making a conscious gain of godliness- 
Lorenzo, having secured the promotion of his son, pro- 
ceeded, out of the treasury oi Florence,— of which city he 

was the boss, — to furnish him with horses richly caparisoned, 
with SUmpter mules, laden with presents for the I 'ope and his 
cardinals, and surrounded him with cavalcades of the noblest 
youth of the City on the Arno. And so Giovanni, — a boy 
of nineteen ! — went to Rome and took up his residence in a 
palace as a prince of the church. 

Giovanni played his cards with all the astuteness of a 
Medici. Holy orders sat lightly upon him; he never went 
beyond the order of deacons, nor did he entangle himself 
with the sanctities of the priesthood. He was an elegant 
man, prudent withal and a favorite with the ladies- The 



290 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

reigning Pope grew jealous of him, and he withdrew from the 
city. But Giovanni bided his time, and while yet in the 
thirties, on the death of Julius II, he himself, as cardinal 
deacon, acting as scrutinor of the ballot, proclaimed his own 
election. When asked what name he would assume he an- 
swered, turning his turquoise ring the while: 

"In my idle hours, when I have indulged the absurd dream 
that I might be chosen successor of Blessed Peter, I have 
said that if so strange and unmerited an honor should befall 
me I would take the name of Leo X 1 in honor of Leo IX of 
sacred memory." 

And so, Giovanni de Medici was proclaimed Pope Leo X 
from the window of the Vatican, to the waiting people of 
Rome. 

Leo X has given his name to an age of the world. Men 
speak of the Age of Pericles as the age in which Greek genius 
fruited ; they speak of the Age of Augustus as the age in 
which Horace and Vergil sang their songs; and the Latin 
genius had its brief clay of glory ; and so they speak of the 
Age of Leo X as the age in which the splendor of the Italian 
Renaissance culminated. Leo X was the liberal patron of arts 
and letters, he was the center of a magnificent court. Cour- 
tesans, elegant and refined, soothed his idle hours; he was a 
pagan of the pagans, when he came from Mass he would smile 
and say: "This Christianity is a convenient superstition!" 
In his hands the exploitation of the gods was a conscious, 
necessary method of supplying the ever-hungry maw of the 
papal treasury with silver and gold. Ecclesiastical offices 
were sold to the highest bidder; indulgences, giving pardon 
for sins, were common commodities in the market. Hawkers 
of these papal parchments were in every city and village and 
at every cross-road, crying their wares. No one with money 
in his pocket need go unshrived of his sin. 

The papal curia sold the archbishopric of Mayence to 
Prince Albert of Brandenburg for fifty thousand gulden, and 
then gave the archbishop the right to sell indulgences through 
Northern Germany to recoup himself. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 291 

But this was going too far! The outraged gods awoke to 
their shame. When Tetzel, the agent of the archbishop, 
came into the Electorate of Saxony peddling his wares, and 
was drawing toward Wittenberg, the storm that had been 
brewing, broke, with violence. One Brother Martin, son of 
a miner of Eisleben, — monk and professor, — nailed to the 
door of his church his thesis asserting that he would main- 
tain before all-comers the proposition that all this indulgence 
business was unscriptural, unholy, a profanation of God, and 
a robbery of man- And all the people were aflame at the 
words of Brother Martin, and the flame spread, until all 
Germany was in conflagration. 

At first the elegant Leo, toying with his courtesans, laugh- 
ed at the uncouth monk, who called his infallibility into ques- 
tion. But his laugh did not put out the fire. Then he 
threatened. But his threats only fanned the flames ; and 
before Leo died, the right of the Pope and his priests to ex- 
ploit the gods to the shame of the gods and the loss of the 
people was burned to ashes in Northern Germany and with 
it was consumed the right of the Pope to rule over the intel- 
ligence and the conscience of man. 

The unity of the church was rent asunder, and Catholicism 
became a sect. 



CHAPTER LVIII 
Joseph Comes to His Own 

The religious upheaval of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth 
centuries not only created the national churches and religious 
denominations of Protestantism, but it also profoundly trans- 
formed the Catholic Church itself. The Catholic Church of 
the post-Reformation period is so unlike the Church of the 
Middle Age, or the Church of the Italian Renaissance, that it 



292 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

seems not the same but a different institution. It is true that 
the church did not abate its claims, but it did abate, in some 
degree, its insolence in the assertion of its claims. In the 
Council of Trent it did reaffirm all its traditions ; it still 
clothed the Pope with the powers of a Vice-God, but the 
Pope did not (because he could not) exercise those powers 
with his old-time rigor. A great section of Europe had 
escaped from under his hand ; he could not punish, he could 
only scold it. The men of the North smiled at his ex- 
communication and laughed at his interdict, and even the 
men of the South, who remained steadfast in the old order, 
would not endure such exercise of papal tyranny. So the 
excommunication was reserved for the recalcitrant priests, 
and the interdict fell into innocuous desuetude. 

After the religious wars were over, and the persecutions 
had spent their force, mankind at large was delivered from 
the fear of the papal censure. Only the priests of the church 
need fear the wrath of the church. 

Not only did the religious revolution limit the power of 
the Pope, it also purified his court. After the Reformation 
the seat of Peter was never again defiled by the occupancy 
of such monsters as Bartholomew Cossa (John XXIII), or 
by such rascals as Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI), or even 
by such worldlings as Giovanni de Medici (Leo X). The 
necessities of the times brought to the front men of different 
character and caliber, — men less able, perhaps, but of purer 
morals. 

The Italian voluptuary, Leo X., was succeeded by the 
harsh, stern, ascetic Adrian of Utrecht, tutor of the Emperor 
Charles V, who saw in his great office not a means of indulg- 
ing his artistic tastes or enriching his relatives but an op- 
portunity to serve God and the people. He struggled to make 
of the church not a mere political machine but a religious 
institution. Adrian's lot was not a happy one. He was a 
Netherlander and the church was Italian; he was pure and 
the church was corrupt; he was religious and the church 
political. After his brief pontificate of a year, which did 
nothing but lay bare the hideous ulcer that was eating at 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 293 

the vitals of the church, the papacy slipped back into the 
keeping of the family of the Medici, Giulio, nephew of Leo X, 
succeeding Adrian. Under his pusillanimous, feeble guid- 
ance, the Roman Church drifted on to ruin. Giulio de 
Medici, — who took the name of Clement VII, — shilly-shallied 
with Henry VIII of England in the matter of the divorce 
until England was lost to the church. He played fast and 
loose with the Emperor, until in desperation, the armies of 
the Emperor, under the Constable Bourbon, stormed and 
sacked the City of Rome. 

The Papal See had to wait twenty years for the three 
great popes of the counter reformation : Michele Chislere, 
(Pius V), Ugo Boncompagni (Gregory VIII), and Felice 
Peretti (Sixtus V)- Under these pontiffs the course of the 
Reformation was arrested ; France became once more the 
eldest son of the church, Bavaria and South Germany re- 
turned to the fold and reaction set in all over Europe. Cathol- 
icism invaded the strongholds of Protestantism and kept up 
a guerilla warfare all along the line. 

Under the impulse of the scientific movement, the church 
acquired a sanity unknown to her earlier history. She de- 
pended less on miracles and more on moral forces. A new 
order of saints adorned her calendar. St. Francis de Sales, 
St. Philip of Neri, and St. Charles Borromeo were men of 
saner mind than Benedict of Nursia, St. Chad and Cuthbert, 
or even St- Francis of Assisi. The only miracles wrought 
by these post-Reformation saints were miracles of goodness 
and marvels of benevolence. St. Ignatius Loyola placed 
at the service of the church not the miracle-mongering of the 
medievalist, but the ardor of the Spanish lover allied to the 
greatest political organizing genius of his or any other age. 
Just after the Reformation the Catholic church was far more 
sane than the Protestant bodies. 

The church became more masculine in its way of thinking 
and acting. The great religious wars put an end to the 
feminism of the Middle Age; Mary began to lose her hold 
on every-day devotion- Catholicism did not, as did Protest- 
antism, cast out Mary from the company of the gods, her 



294 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

doctors did not follow the example of John Knox, who tore 
down the painted image of Mary from the walls of the 
Cathedral of St. Giles, saying: "Tis naethin, but a pinted 
boord," and so threw it into the street. The Catholic fathers 
were far better mannered, they used the political artifices 
of promotion to remove the goddess out of the way of the 
male world that was looking for male gods. 

The deification of Mary was the care of the Curia and the 
Jesuits ; by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which 
became an article of the faith in 1854 by decree of Pope Pius 
IX, Mary was delivered from the curse of the daughters of 
Eve. It is the wretched lot of the common woman, accord- 
ing to the teachings of the church, to conceive in sin and 
shape in wickedness, — she bears in her womb the guilty seed 
of Adam and her babe comes into this world under the curse 
of God. From this miserable estate Mary was delivered by 
the miraculous intervention of God- 

The doctrine of her perpetual virginity removed Mary 
from earth to heaven. She was not of mortal nature, she be- 
longed of right to the immortals. The Spanish genius of 
Murillo paints her as the new Artemis, standing in the cres- 
cent Moon, surrounded by a cloud of babies that were never 
born, and, because never born, never grow old, but play 
like kittens eternally round their deity in the upper cirrus, 
where Mary stands at ease. Such a goddess may condescend 
to visit the earth from time to time and soothe the hysteria 
of an overwrought nun, she may step out from the Moon to 
kiss the eyes of real little children, but she can never be the 
divinity of the work-a-day world ; she can never bend her 
back under the basket nor pin up her skirts and with bare 
feet trample the grapes in the wine vats. Her delicacy for- 
bids the roughness of the world. Priests might exalt her and 
women worship her, but men began to say: "She's naught 
but a woman, and this is a man's world-" 

Human life in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in 
Europe was shifting its base from the supernatural to the 
natural, and the Church was slowly following the shift. The 
common people moved more rapidly than the clergy. The 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 295 

clergy are always an age behind the people in all that regards 
the common life. The good Cardinal Pelliccia, in his "Christ- 
ian Antiquities/' speaking of the vestments of the clergy, 
says: "These, at the first were garments common to the 
clergy and the laity, but when they became obsolete with the 
laity, they then became peculiar to the clergy." And this is a 
general proposition: What is obsolete with the laity is the 
peculiar possession of the clergy. As Mary became peculiar 
to the clergy, the monk, and the nun, she became more and 
more obsolete with the laity. 

The worship of the Virgin no longer holds the first place 
with the man of Northern Italy, of France, and of England. 
The cult of Joseph is superseding the cult of Mary. The 
common people, reasoning as the common people do, mytho- 
logically, are finding in Joseph a god in accord with their 
present thought and feeling. In spite of the church they are 
in this cult asserting the paternity of Joseph ; they are say- 
ing that if Jesus were a son he must have had a father, if 
Mary was a mother she must have had a husband ; and who 
was the father of Jesus and the husband of Mary but Joseph? 
History knows of no other. So Joseph has come into his 
own again. 

For centuries the theology of the church had denied 
Joseph the company of his wife and the paternity of his son. 
It had declared him unfit for the high and holy function of 
husband and father; he had been made to play the ignoble 
part of a protector to a son not his own, and the guardian 
of a wife, who was a wife in name only. But all this the 
common sense of the common people is correcting; by the 
worship of Joseph they are asserting the divinity of the hus- 
band and the father over against the divinity of the mother 
and the son. They say if Jesus is on the right hand of God, 
and Mary on the left, then Joseph has a right to stand before 
God and speak his mind. He can know better the needs 
of man than a woman, he is nearer to the earth than his exalted 
son, so the men of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth 
Centuries, who were sailing the seas, discovering new coun- 
tries, founding new states, building cities, and plowing the 



296 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

wilderness, turned to Joseph as to a god who was himself a 
man, living a man's life, and doing a man's work. 

The growth of the cult of Joseph in the modern Catholic 
Church is a growth of naturalism at the expense of super- 
naturalism. As the late St- George-Mivart (himself a Cath- 
olic, but for this and other like sayings, excommunicated 
and dying outside the Catholic pale) said : 

"It [the cult of Joseph] is preparing the Catholic 
Church to acknowledge the natural generation of Jesus 
and to confess the sanctity of nature." 

For which act of condescension, when it comes, Nature, 
with her cleansing waters and her stainless skies, will forever 
be beholden to Holy Church. 



CHAPTER LIX 
The Gods Break Loose 

The revolution in Europe that gave to the Western world 
freedom of thought and conscience (miscalled the Reforma- 
tion) came with violence. It was a shifting of the base of 
human life from heaven to earth. It was a struggle between 
freedom and authority, between imperialism and nationalism, 
between centralization and home rule- It was a conflict be- 
tween the god of the church and the god of the world. Prince 
and priest were fighting to the death in this warfare. 

Luther, when he nailed his thesis to the door of the church 
in Wittenberg, was in reality only the spokesman of the 
Elector of Saxony. It was Frederick who stood behind 
Luther and urged him on. All the princes of North Germany 
were in rebellion against the papal and the imperial system. 
They received no blessing from the Pope and no protection 
from the empire. The exactions from the papal and imperial 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 297 

treasuries impoverished them and their people. Frederick 
bit his nails in anger and disgust when his rival Albert of 
Brandenburg, under cover of the sanction of the Pope, sent 
his hawkers of indulgences into the Electorate of Saxony, to 
get money to pay for the Archbishopric of Mayence. 

When, then, Luther called the people to revolt, he had not 
only the tacit consent, he had the active cooperation of the 
Prince. It was the princes, as the representatives of the 
people, who were the earliest beneficiaries of the so-called 
Reformation. Luther appealed from the Pope to the princes, 
and the princes sustained his appeal. 

In this crisis the Holy Roman Empire was revived and 
made its last struggle for supremacy in Europe. Just after 
the outbreak of the Reformation the throne of the Empire 
was vacated by the death of Maximilian. The vacancy was 
contested by three brilliant young princes who had just suc- 
ceeded to the thrones of the three leading monarchies in 
Western Europe : the gallant Francis I of France ; the bluff, 
impulsive Henry VIII of England, and the man of genius, 
Charles V of Spain, were the rivals for the imperial purple. 

Charles, a prince of Austria, of the house of Hapsburg, 
secured the prize. 

Upon this young man fortune had showered all her favors. 
In the right of his father Philip, he was the Lord of Flanders, 
Brabant, and all the rich provinces of the Netherlands ; in 
the right of his mother Johanna he was heir to the throne of 
Ferdinand and Isabella who had, by the conquest of Granada, 
extinguished the dominion of the Moors and had made of old 
Hispania the consolidated kingdom of Spain. And as if this 
were not enough, fortune sent Columbus avoyaging that she 
might pour the gold of the Montezumas and the Incas into 
the lap of her favorite. 

Nor was Charles unworthy of his fortune, being comely 
of person, acute and far-seeing of mind, and possessed of that 
subtle quality that we call genius. Furthermore, he was a 
soldier of no mean capacity; he was cautious in victory and 
imperturable in defeat. 



298 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

As a ruler Charles V was perplexed by the multitude of his 
affairs and the heterogeneity of his dominions. The Nether- 
lands, Spain, and America presented problems of government 
beyond the power of any man to grasp and solve. Lord of 
the Netherlands at fifteen, King of Spain at seventeen, Charles 
at the age of twenty-two was the most considerable personage 
of Europe- For thirty-two years he weathered the storms 
of the stormiest period of human history, and as a worn-out 
old man laid down the cares of empire at fifty-five and retired 
to a monastery, where he died. 

Such was the leader of the forces of the old order in the 
warfare between the priests and the people. Charles, after 
some vacillations, embraced the fortunes of the papacy and 
devoted his energies during the greater portion of his reign 
to the suppression of heresy and reestablishment of the 
Catholic faith. He placed the Protestant princes under the 
ban of the Empire. These princes in the year 1528 assembled 
in Schmalkald, formed a league, offensive and defensive, and 
made war upon the Emperor- The war of Schmalkald was 
a war between Protestant and Catholic Europe ; it was a 
war between North and South Germany ; it was the beginning 
of the rivalry between Prussia and Austria. In Germany this 
war lasted (with interregnums) for a hundred and twenty 
years ; by it Germany was desolated ; the soldiery, Catholic 
and Protestant, were equally ruthless, cities were sacked, 
children murdered, and women violated in the name of Christ 
and in the name of the Pope. As the war went on the armies 
of Wallenstein from the south and of Gustavus Adolphus 
from the north, overran the country and left a wasted land 
behind them. 

Peace came with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Writing 
of this period Menzel says : 

Misery and suffering had cooled the religious zeal of the 
people, license that of the troops, and diplomacy that of the 
princes. The thirst for blood had been satiated and pas- 
sion worn out by excess slumbered. Peace was at this 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 299 

juncture proclaimed throughout the Empire to all besieged 
cities, to the trembling princes, to the wailing people. 1 

Then, as now, poor Belgium was the meeting-place of the 
contending armies. 

Upon the abdication of Charles V his wide dominions be- 
came the possession of his son Philip II. Philip had nothing 
of the genius of his father. He was a Spaniard by birth and 
nature and a bigot of the old faith. He made the suppression 
of heresy and the reestablishment of Catholicism the sole 
purpose of his reign- In that effort he lost the Northern 
Provinces of the Netherlands, impoverished Spain, reduced 
that country from the first to the third State in Europe, and 
forced it to enter upon a decline from which it has never 
recovered. 

The new faith spread rapidly in the Netherlands. It won 
to its leadership a genius of the first order; William (called 
the Silent) Prince of Orange, — who is one of the heroic 
figures of history. There was nothing in the youth or early 
manhood of this prince to forecast the future that was to 
make him remembered for all ages. Brought up as a Catholic, 
in the court of Charles V, he was a favorite of the Emperor, 
who leaned on his shoulder on the day of his abdication. A 
free liver, William expended the revenues of his rich posses- 
sions and involved himself in debt, but in common with all 
the princes and nobles (Protestant and Catholic) of the 
Netherlands he resented the violation of the liberties of the 
Provinces by the tyrannies of Philip II. With Egmont, 
Horn, and others, Orange entered upon a constitutional op- 
position to the policy of Philip. When Egmont and Horn 
were betrayed and beheaded, the burden of leadership fell 
upon William, and he proved himself equal to the task. He 
renounced his Catholicism ; the extravagancies of his youth 
fell from him, and he came to be known as Father William, — 
plain, homely, a leader rather than a ruler of his people. 
Under his steady hand the revolution in the Netherlands, so 
far as the Northern Provinces were concerned, was conducted 
to a successful issue. 

1 M,€nzel's "History of Germany," Bohn Edition, vol. II, pp. 394-5. 



300 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Philip threw against this indomitable man and his people 
all the forces of Spain. The Duke of Alva practiced every 
stratagem and cruelty known to warfare- The Duke was a 
pious Catholic; he went to Mass every morning and he 
called his soldiers to go to Mass and then from the altar of 
his God he went out to lay waste the fields, to burn the cities, 
to murder the men, and outrage the women of Flanders, Bra- 
bant, Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland. He besieged, took, 
and sacked Antwerp, and in the sacking of that city there 
was no horror left undone. He went out toward Flushing, 
and the people opened their dykes and flooded him with the 
waters of the sea. 

In the wars of the Netherlands, it is estimated that more 
than a million people perished by violence, and property 
exceeding in value five hundred million pounds was trodden 
under foot and burned by fire. The wars of the gods are 
costly. 

During all this carnage William was silent, steady, un- 
conquerable- To get rid of him, Philip had to have him 
assassinated. But dead, he still, by his spirit, held the people 
to their task. Exhausted Spain was compelled to grant in- 
dependence to the Northern Provinces, and Holland, for a 
brief period, succeeded Spain as a leading country of Europe. 

In France, the old and the new gods fought for the mastery 
on the open field and by secret assassination, respectively on 
the field of Ivry and in the Massacre of St. Bartholemew, 
Henry of Navarre gave religious peace to France by compro- 
mise. He bought Paris by a Mass- He embraced the old 
faith, without believing it; gave freedom to the new faith, 
without caring for it; turned the minds of men from religion 
to politics and to women; fought Catholic or Protestant, as 
suited his schemes; prepared the way for Richelieu, who pur- 
suing the indifferent policy of Henry in matters of religion, 
made France the arbiter of Europe. 

In the struggle between the old and the new gods France 
suffered the loss of her religious life and her moral integrity. 
Formally Catholic, — really atheistic; her manners depraved, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 301 

her politics corrupt,— she entered upon that downward career 
that brought her to the horrors of the Revolution. 

In England the struggle between the old and new was 
neither so violent nor so bloody as that of the Continent, nor 
was it so radical. Fortunately, the king wanted a divorce 
and broke with the Pope, who would not give it to him- 
Mary, by the sacrifice of a few lives in the fires of Smithfield, 
hoping to make England Catholic, succeeded in making that 
country Protestant beyond reclamation. Elizabeth estab- 
lished a hybrid church, — Protestant in doctrine, Catholic in 
ministry and worship, — which to this day has satisfied the 
religious requirements of the English people. 

When the religious wars were over, the gods of the past 
were driven back to their old seats in the Mediterranean 
basin ; the gods of the new order possessed the North and 
the West. London was the center of exchange ; the Atlantic 
Ocean succeeded the Middle Sea as the highway of commerce, 
and mankind began a great movement from the Old World 
to the New in search of new homes and new gods. 



Book X 
GODS OF THE MODERN WORLD 



CHAPTER LX 
The Disruption of Protestantism 

The movement in the religious history of the Western 
world, known as the Reformation, was far more destructive 
than reformatory. Beginning as an effort to restore the 
church to its primitive purity, it accomplished the complete 
disruption of the organization and made of a united Catholic 
Church a congery of hostile sects. Protestantism, based as 
it -is upon a contradiction, is by name and nature disruptive in 
its effect ; for, while appealing to authority, it asserts the right 
of private judgment in matters of faith. Private judgment 
and authority cannot, however, live together in peace. It is 
as if one tied a cat and a snake together in a bag : the cat will 
claw the life out of the snake, or the snake will strangle the 
cat. 

Protestantism was not progressive, it was a reactionary 
movement; it had no desire to explore the future, its 
only wish was to restore the past. Luther's first appeal 
from the Pope was to a General Council of the church, — 
a General Assembly wherein he might ask the church to 
decide the matters at issue between himself and the Holy 
See. But it was not for a monk to call a General Council; 
that was the province of the Pope and the Emperor. In 
the absence of the Emperor, Luther appealed to the princes 
of the Empire, many of whom joined with him in this de- 
mand for a reforming council. 

In this action the Reformers were in accord with usage, 
for all church disputes had been settled in General Councils. 
Only a hundred years before the outbreak of Lutheranism 
the Council of Constance had met in 1414 for the reforming 
of the church in its head and members, had deposed the 

305 



306 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

reigning Pope, John XXIII, and had elected the Cardinal 
Colonna, Martin V, in nis room. It was not until the Diet 
of Augsburg, in 1531, that the Lutheran quarrel took on the 
nature and proportions of a schism. 

In the Diet of Augsburg, the Emperor, Charles V, made 
submission to the Pope a condition of imperial protection, 
whereupon the Lutheran princes protested and withdrew 
from the Diet and a war between the Empire and the Re- 
formers ensued, — a war that lasted for a hundred years. 

The protesting princes directed their theologians to draw 
up a Confession of Faith, which document, known as the 
Augsburg Confession, is to this day the theological creed 
of all Lutheran bodies, and is the source of the XXXIX 
Articles of the English church. 

The Confession takes over bodily from the ancient church 
the theology of the Greek philosophers and of the Latin 
lawyers. Its conception of God is the conception of Athan- 
asius and Augustine. The doctrines of the Trinity, the 
incarnation, the atonement, the final judgment, heaven and 
hell, together with the sacraments, were all reaffirmed in 
the Augsburg Confession, — a confession that discarded the 
authority of the Pope, the worship of the saints, and the 
celibacy of the clergy, and denied all merit to good works, 
making salvation by faith only the emphatic Article of the 
revised creed. 

The new movement, when organized, simply substituted 
one church for another. In this church the princes were 
the popes and the theological faculties the cardinals. The 
new orthodoxy was even more rigid than the old ; heresy 
was punished by fire and sword, not only as treason to the 
church but as rebellion against the prince. Lutheranism 
when crystallized became the state religion of Northern Ger- 
many and Scandinavia, and it is so to this day. 

But this newly-established church could not control the 
Protestant movement. Next in importance to Luther in the 
world of modern religion was John Calvin, a native of Pic- 
ardy in France. Banished from his own country by the 
Catholic King, he fled to Geneva, where he converted the 
people to the new faith and established his religious capital 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 307 

as the rival of Rome. The history of the next hundred 
years was the history of the struggle of Rome with Geneva 
for supremacy in France, the Netherlands, and Great Brit- 
ain. 

Calvin, like Luther, was not a progressive but a reaction- 
ary; his appeal was from the church to the Bible. He put 
the human mind in thrall, not to Athanasius or Augustine 
but to Moses and Isaiah, to Jeremiah and David, to Paul 
and John. Calvin revived the worship of the God of the 
Book: the God of Calvin was to be found in the Book and 
nowhere else but in the Book. Under the hand of this 
master workman the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired line 
by line, word by word, comma by comma, by Jehovah, God 
of the Hebrews; the writers of the Book were the penmen 
of Jehovah, inscribing his thoughts and writing of his life. 
So perfect was this work of Calvin that to this day hosts 
of educated men and women think when they are reading 
the Bible that they are reading the history of God. It is 
only in our day and among the more advanced minds that 
the Bible has lost its peculiar place of sanctity and been 
restored to its lawful position among the literatures of the 
world. 

This talismanic book was the sole rule of faith in the 
Genevan church, to be interpreted by each man according 
to the light that was in him; but woe be to that man who 
interpreted it contrary to the construction put upon the 
Word by Calvin and the doctors. Such a one was a heretic, 
fit only for exile and burning. 

Calvin was a metaphysical genius. At the age of twenty- 
seven he wrote "The Institutes of the Christian Religion," 
which ever since has been the quarry of Protestant Evang- 
elical theology. Calvin's scheme rests as on a corner stone, 
upon the absolute sovereignty of God. Its cardinal text is 
"The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth." There is one God 
and there is none besides Him. The omnipotence of God 
is limitless, — what He wills He wills — and nothing lies out- 
side His will. Logically, Calvin was as much a Unitarian 
as Mahomet, but being a schoolman, he was enmeshed in 



308 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the contradictions of Greek theology, which he took over 
bodily and incorporated in his plan of salvation. 

Second in importance to the sovereignty of God was the 
doctrine of the total depravity of the nature of man, conse- 
quent upon the sin of Adam. In the thought of Calvin man 
as man is under the wrath of God, condemned to eternal 
torment. God in his good pleasure, to show forth his glory, 
elected or selected a chosen few of these lost wretches to 
salvation ; the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy 
Trinity, voluntarily undertaking to pay the proper penalty 
of their sin. In this plan of reorganization, Calvin allowed 
only two sacraments: baptism and the Lord's supper (and 
the Lord's supper was a memorial feast, not a sacrifice) ; 
did away with the altar and the priest, and established the 
pulpit and the preacher. 

This form of religion, in the period of its expansion, freed 
the Netherlands from the bondage of Spain, gave civil 
liberty to England, and laid the foundations of the Am- 
erican Commonwealth. 

The Calvinist took over all the promises of Jehovah to 
Israel. He was the chosen of God, his God was the War- 
God of Israel. As God had drowned the Egyptians in the 
waters of the Red Sea, so did he sweep the cohorts of Alva 
to their death by the waves of the Zuyder Zee. The men of 
Cromwell drove the army of Charles I from Marston-Moor 
crying: "The sword of the Lord and Gideon!" The Pilgrim 
Fathers on the Mayflower laid the foundations of a new 
nation on the Word of God. Few movements in human 
history have been more prolific of results than the Genevan 
movement of John Calvin. 

A third variety of Protestantism found its expression in 
the teaching of Huldreich Zwingli, of the Canton of Saint 
Gall in Switzerland, who made his appeal from the church 
to the Bible as interpreted by the human reason. This 
movement, at the first feeble to abortiveness, has gradually 
permeated both Lutheranism and Calvinism and is at pres- 
ent the most influential force in Protestant Christendom. 
The Bible as interpreted by the reason is becoming more 
and more the religion of the Protestant; but this is only a 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 309 

half-way station, the road must end in the constant dis- 
ruption and final disappearance of Protestantism. Already 
the critical reason has destroyed the authority of the Bible 
as an infallible revelation from God. 

Primitive Protestantism, in its three phases of Luther- 
anism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism, was the creation of 
the rising burgher class, — the religious form of the struggle 
between the merchant and the landlord. In its result it 
brought about the partial triumph of the purse over the 
sword. In this form of Protestantism religion ceased to be 
pietistic and became materialistic ; its virtues were the 
virtues of the merchant class ; it went short on sanctity and 
long on respectability. Carlyle designates this sort of re- 
ligion as "gigmanity," since no one could be reckoned a 
good Protestant who had not risen to the dignity of riding 
in his own gig. 

The mean workmen and the poor have never been at 
home in the Protestant churches ; at best these are allowed 
in Protestant places of worship only on sufferance. They 
can sit in back seats and in remote galleries, but must never 
trespass on the preserves of the pew-holder. 

In the Anabaptist movement, which had its center in 
Munster, an effort was made to democratize Protestantism. 
The leaders of this movement, who were either of the work- 
ing class or allied themselves with that class, proclaimed 
the doctrine of free consent as the basis of the religious 
life, every man being given the liberty to choose his god by 
the free act of his own will. On this ground the Anabaptist 
denied the validity of infant baptism, declaring such baptism 
was void, because it was not preceded by the free choice 
of the baptized person. Not only baptism but all church 
rites and legal forms were subject to the acid test of free 
choice. No one was to be required to believe what he did 
not choose to believe, nor to do what he did not choose to 
do. 

This doctrine, — freeing, as it did, men and women from 
the binding rules of an oppressive social order, — gained 
great headway with the working classes who are the vic- 
tims of that order. Had the Munster movement succeed- 



310 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

ed, the working class revolution that is now in progress 
would have been anticipated by three centuries. But it 
could not succeed, because its time was not yet come. The 
merchant class had to evolve and prevail before the working 
class could attain to that degree of class consciousness and 
class solidarity which has given it its power in the present 
world. 

The uprising of the working people in Munster, and 
other cities, under the leadership of Zwickaw, Storch, and 
Stubner, was suppressed with terrible slaughter, and the 
peasants' war, which threatened for a time the destruction 
of the whole social order, was arrested by the same ruth- 
less methods. After this conflict with the working class, 
Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism hardened into 
the forms that they have held to this day. They are little 
aristocracies based upon material wealth ; high church Lu- 
theranism is the natural meeting-place of the old and the 
new aristocracy; Calvinism is the home of the successful 
merchant; and Zwinglianism the club of the successful scholar 
and professional man. 

The working class is either Catholic or agnostic. The 
Catholic church remains to-day, as it has been since the 
days of Leo I, a vast imperial democracy, while the Protest- 
ant churches are little aristocratic republics; and imperial 
democracy rather than aristocratic republicanism has al- 
ways been the refuge of the working class. 

Protestantism in all its forms is to-day in process of 
dissolution. It has divided and sub-divided until it has at 
last lost its explosive power. It can no longer so much as 
cast off new bodies from itself. Its conceptions of the 
world are outgrown, its teachers are without authority, 
its various churches competing for membership are by this 
competition becoming bankrupt. With creeds discredited, 
with people destitute of cohesive energy, organic Protest- 
ism is slowly but surely melting away, and its forces, so 
long restrained in a congealed orthodoxy, are flowing down 
in streams to the great sea of living thought. 

There are in the United States about 20,000,000 Pro- 
testants divided into more than 100 sects, ministered to 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 311 

by 170,000 clergy, with an average congregation of 150 and 
an average salary of $600. These facts speak for them- 
selves. 



CHAPTER LXI 

The Crystallization of Catholicism 

As a consequence of its struggle with Protestantism, 
Catholicism crystallized its past and by that crystallization, 
made forever impossible its adaptation to the changing 
thought and life of the world. At the Council of Trent 
the church reaffirmed its ancient doctrines and its ancient 
rights. It did not abate one jot or one tittle of its claims 
to the spiritual and political sovereignty of the world. The 
Pope, as the successor of Peter and as the Vicar of Christ, 
exercised all the powers of God in the earth. 

Prior to the Protestant movement the Roman papacy 
partook in a small degree of the nature of a constitutional 
monarchy; since the Reformation it has developed into an 
imperial autocracy. By the decree of papal infallibility of 
the Vatican Council of 1870, the last vestige of Con- 
stitutionalism was removed from the papacy, so that to-day 
the Pope rules alone in the church in all matters of doctrine 
and discipline, creates all cardinals, appoints all bishops 
in foreign parts and, either directly or by means of his 
appointed agents, regulates the most minute affairs of the 
church. 

Under the present order of the Catholic church, the Pope 
is the incarnation of the Celestial Caesar of the Roman 
lawyers. As God rules in heaven, so does the Pope rule 
in the earth, and any rebellion against him is treason 
against God. Theoretically, there is no limit to the power 
of the pontiff. As the supreme authority in all that con- 
cerns faith and morals, he has the right of control over the 
education of the young; the relationship of husband and 
wife is in his keeping; he has the censorship of all think- 



312 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

ing, writing and speaking. When there is any conflict 
between the civil mind and the mind of the Pope the mind 
of the Pope has the right of way. He as the Supreme Pas- 
tor of the Flock of Christ, — the court of final appeal in all 
disputes relating to conduct and opinion. The present 
Pope, by right of his office, is as much the ruler of the 
world as was Gregory VII or Innocent III, nor was Boni- 
face VIII more drastic in the assertion of papal claims 
than is the present Pontifc.v Maximus; together with his 
cardinals. 

The power of the Pope is limited only by the Catholic 
tradition. No Pope may go contrary to Catholic tradi- 
tion, for that would be to do violence to his own authority, 
which has its source in this same Catholic tradition. At 
the Reformation, Catholic tradition was finally crystallized 
into theological dogma, and by this crystallization the primi- 
tive and medieval world survives into modern times. In 
its political organization, in its conception of nature, in its 
thoughts of life and death, in its notions of God, in its de- 
scriptions of heaven and hell, in its cult of the saints, in its 
reverence of the clergy, in its worship of the Pope, we have 
in crystallized form all that was active and living in the life 
of Western Europe from trie Fourth to the Fifteenth Cen- 
tury. This church has resisted with crystalline power all 
efforts of modification from within, but has been worn away 
by the slow corroding process of attrition from without. 

The creedal division of Europe at the close of the reli- 
gious war was as it is now : Southern Europe was stead- 
fastly Catholic, Northern Europe as firmly Protestant, with 
France as doubtful territory lying between, and Ireland, 
for racial and political reasons, more intensely Catholic 
than Rome itself. In America to-day the like division pre- 
vails : North America belongs to Protestantism, with a 
Catholic infusion, and South America and Mexico are 
Catholic, with a tendency toward rationalism. 

Since the Reformation the Catholic Church has continued 
to work along the lines of more perfect crystallization, every 
attempt from within to adapt the church to present life 
and thought having met with signal failure. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 313 

In the Seventeenth Century, Molinos, a Spanish priest 
resident in Paris, was enamoured of the discipline of the 
German Quietists. He sought to make the life of the soul less 
dependent upon the church; and while not denying the 
value of confession, of public prayer, and of the Holy Sac- 
rament of the Altar, he insisted that spiritual life was, in 
its essence, the direct communion between the soul of man 
and the spirit of God ; that it was a secret life, and not 
even a priest had the right to pry into this holy relationship, — 
when the lover was with his beloved the -door was shut 
against all curious eyes. This teacher discouraged frequent 
confession, deplored constant resort to a spiritual director, 
and made public prayer subordinate to private prayer and 
meditation. Molinos' teaching came as a breath of fresh 
air to a people weary of formal religion. Fashionable Paris, 
especially the women, ran after Molinos and his church was 
crowded whenever he gave the sermon or meditation. 

From Paris Molinos went to Rome and was received 
with acclaim by clergy and people. Many of the cardinals 
were numbered with his followers, and it was hinted that 
even the Pope inclined to his teaching. For a moment 
it seemed as if the Catholic Church would readmit by the 
back door what it had driven out by the front; but this was 
not to be. The Jesuit Order took alarm, the Holy Office 
of the Inquisition became active; in a night Molinos and a 
host of his followers, among whom were high dignitaries 
of the church, found themselves in the grip of that mysteri- 
ous and terrible power. His following dispersed, Molinos 
was condemned as a heretic and languished in prison for the 
rest of his life. 

Another effort at modification, made in the Seventeenth 
Century by a group of French pietists, came to a like disas- 
trous end. This endeavor had its origin in the writings 
of one Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres in the Low Countries, 
who, tinged with Calvinism, gave to the Grace of God 
an undue place in his theological scheme. These writings 
of his failed to allow due prominence to the rites of the 
church and the merits of the saints, while they laid undue 



314 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

stress on personal holiness as a requisite of salvation. His 
rather commonplace book became the inspiration of a move- 
ment that for a time threatened once more the unity of the 
church. A devoted band of men and women (known, from 
the Convent that was their headquarters as the Fort- 
Royalists), — some of them the leading minds of the time, 
such as Pascal, his sister Jacqueline, and Arnaud, a pro- 
fessor of the Sorbonne, — became the disciples of the new 
cult. 

The Jesuits were the sworn enemies of the Jansenists, 
and the struggle between these factions disturbed the peace 
of the church for nearly fifty years, — a conflict made forever 
famous by the "Lettres Provinciales" of Pascal, in which, 
with an irony unrivalled in literature, he attacked the posi- 
tion of the Jesuits and laid open the secret sources of their 
power. 

But, despite the weapon of Pascal's genius hurled in deri- 
sion against the morality of the teachings of the Jesuits, and 
despite the eloquence and learning of Arnaud, the cause of 
the Jesuits triumphed. The Convent of Port-Royal was 
suppressed, its preachers silenced, its nuns were scattered 
abroad, and the Catholic Church in France, because it knew 
not the time of its visitation, was left to await its destruc- 
tion in the storms of the Revolution. 

In the Nineteenth Century the Catholic Church had for a 
moment a liberal, reforming Pope in the person of Pius IX, 
who at his election was hailed as the coming liberator of 
Italy. But early in his reign, frightened by the violence 
and radicalism of the liberal movement, Pius became an 
extreme reactionary. 

In the Encyclical of 1854, he condemned modern science ; 
he made the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of 
the Blessed Virgin Mary de fide, and in the Council of 
the Vatican declared the infallibility of the Pope to be an 
Article of Faith of the Catholic Church. When Doellinger 
and the theological faculty of Munich, — the one Catholic in- 
stitution of learning that had standing in Europe, — pro- 
tested against the dogma of the infallibility as unhistorical, 
these great scholars were excommunicated and died without 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 315 

the pale of that Communion which for a generation they 
had served with a learning and a zeal that gave to their 
church the respect of the thinking world of the time. Yet 
these were men who had sought, in a small measure, to 
adapt the Catholic Church to the thought and mind of the 
modern world, for which progressive act the church cast 
them out as unholy and as violators of their vows ! 

The amusing attempt of a group of French and English 
priests to rewrite the dogmas of the church in terms of 
modernism is a matter of recent history. Pius X in the En- 
cyclical de Pascendi condemned modernism, — root and 
branch. The Modernists in return wrote saucy letters 
to the Pope intimating that His Holiness did not quite know 
what he was talking about. But for all this, Pius was the 
Pope, and the Modernists, giving up the effort of reform 
from within, left the church to its incurable conservatism, 
and now are among the most brilliant writers and speakers 
on matters of religion in the Western world. Father Tyr- 
rell is dead, Pere Loisy is in retirement, but Joseph McCabe, 
DeLisle Burns, and Mr. Sullivan are preaching by pen and 
tongue a doctrine of Modernism that is destructive of 
ancient dogma, both Protestant and Catholic. 

Because of the rigor of its crystallization the Catholic 
Church has lost the spiritual and moral leadership of the 
Western world. In the present crisis the Pope is helpless. 
Imprisoned in the Vatican, he can only look on and bewail 
moral evils and spiritual horrors that he is powerless to 
avert. Pius X died in an agony of impotence. The present 
Pope lives unregarded in the presence of a cataclysm that 
is shaking Christendom to its foundations and changing 
the order of the world. His powers, in inverse ratio to his 
claims, make of him an object of commiseration. How are 
the mighty fallen ! He who could once make emperors 
tremble and kings afraid, he at whose word nations bowed in 
fearful submission, cannot now get so much as a hearing in 
the councils and conflicts of the nations. The Catholic 
Church has sacrificed its life to its organization. Like the 
Roman Empire, of which it is the ghost in the modern world, 
it is as perfect as a crystal, — and as dead as a crystal. 



316 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

CHAPTER LXII 
The Return of Pan 

Both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations for the 
past four hundred years and more have been subjected to a 
pressure from without, which, with all the force of a slow- 
moving glacier, has ground the brittle dogmas of Protestant- 
ism to powder and has reduced the crystalline form of the 
Catholic Church to comparatively diminutive proportions. 
This force has been the operation of the free intelligence 
in the investigation of natural and social phenomena. 

Three great movements of the human mind during this 
period have completely destroyed the ancient and medieval 
scheme of the universe, thus making the dogmatic state- 
ments of the church impossible to the educated man. These 
three movements were the revival of letters, the development 
of science, and the democratic revolution. 1 

The first of these, the revival of letters, came at the 
end of the Fifteenth Century, as a consequence of the fall 
of Constantinople. Toward the end of that century, in the 
year 1483, Constantine, the last of the emperors, died in 
the defense of his city, and the capitol of the Roman Em- 
pire was stormed and sacked by the hordes of Mahomet, 
the Turkish Sultan. Christian men and women of noble 
birth were bound together like sheep and sold as slaves 
in the shambles. 

Prior to the capture of the city many distinguished schol- 
ars had fled from the wrath to come and had made their 
way to Rome and other Italian cities, carrying with them a 
store of precious manuscripts of the poems of Homer, the 
dramas of JEschylus, and other writings of the classical 
literature of Greece. These exiles, in order to earn their 
living, established themselves as teachers of the Greek 
language and literature, and under their inspiration Greek 

1 The democratic revolution is so vast a subject that it calls 
for separate treatment in an additional volume. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 317 

learning became all the rage in Italy, whence it spread 
rapidly over western Europe, changing radically the course 
of study in every seat of learning. The writings of the 
Christian fathers and the schoolmen fell at once into dis- 
repute; the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testa- 
ment were thrust into the background, while the scholar- 
ship of Europe occupied itself with the mastery of the 
language and literature of the Athens of Pericles and Plato. 
Greek manuscripts brought fabulous prices, and the dis- 
covery of a new parchment was an event to stir the heart 
of the world. 

This passion for Greek learning gave rise in Europe 
to a passion equally intense for the Greek life. The ascet- 
ic ideal of the Christian religion became abhorrent to these 
students of Greek culture. Nature, which the church had 
condemned as unholy, was, by this revolution in thought 
made divine; the human passions and appetites, it was 
agreed, were given to man for his delight; their suppression 
not their indulgence was the sin; and it was the right and 
duty of every man, as he was able, to live the full, free 
life of the senses. Wine, women, and song were as neces- 
sary to his proper development as were bread and water. 
Popes, priests, and people threw off the restraints of the 
then old-fashioned religion of Christ, and gave themselves 
up without restraint to the worship of Pan ; and that god 
of the Greeks, half man, half beast, became the favorite di- 
vinity of the Hellenic revival of the Fifteenth Century in 
Italy and Europe. The more sober of the Greek gods, such 
as Apollo and Athena, were neglected, while men and wo- 
men practiced with feverish haste the sensual rites of 
Aphrodite and Dionysus. The men of that age reacted with 
fearful violence from the religion of Grace to the religion 
of Nature. 

The leaders of this reaction were the Popes, the cardinals, 
and the clergy of the Catholic Church. The court of Leo 
X was in belief and practice openly Pagan. The pontiff 
and his courtiers practiced all the vices and but few of the 
virtues of Grecian antiquity. These men made a scoff of 
the religion that they administered, and went from the altar 



318 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

to the free indulgence in wine and women as a relief from 
its tediousness. No age of the world has surpassed the 
Italian Renaissance in licentiousness and cruelty. 

The effect of the revival of Greek learning was the de- 
liverance of letters from bondage to the church. Pro- 
fane writings competed with the sacred Scriptures for the 
interest of the reader, and as the profane were the more in- 
teresting, they commanded the greater attention. From 
that time, even until now, no man is considered worthy of 
admission to Holy Orders in the English Church until he 
has mastered the amatory odes of Anacreon and the love 
songs of Theocritus. A strange marriage was made between 
Christian austerity and Greek freedom, the product of which 
has been the English bishop, together with his deans and 
canons. 

The Catholic clergy of the Fifteenth Century, in embrac- 
ing the Greek learning, warmed in their bosom a serpent 
that stung their theology to death. Greek literature was 
provocative of thought, and thought was a corrosive poison 
fatal to theological dogma. 

The history of the Catholic Church since the Renaissance 
has been the history of a long and bitter struggle with the 
virus of Greek literature, with its concomitant freedom oi 
thinking, which its Popes, its cardinals, its bishops, and its 
deans so unwisely introduced into its veins. 



CHAPTER LXIII 

The Vision of The Infinite 

The revival of letters, which made the mind of Christen- 
dom acquainted with a non-Christian past of great beauty 
and significance, was quickly followed by another event 
which opened to the Western vision a future of astound- 
ing importance. When Columbus sailed from Palos to 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 319 

the West he was seeking a more direct route to the ports 
of China and India. His discovery of a continent lying 
between the West and the East seemed so incredible that 
the discoverer himself could not believe it. After four 
voyages, and the exploration of what are now known to be 
the shores of Central and South America, Columbus died 
in the belief that what he had found was nothing more than 
the outlying regions of the Chinese and Indian Empires. 
So convinced was he of this that he called the natives of 
these newly discovered lands Indians, and as Indians they 
have been known ever since. 

It required a century and more of exploration and adven- 
ture to convince Europe that it had found not the ancient 
land of Cathay but a region vast in extent, rich in natural 
wealth, lying open to the possession and settlement of the 
first-comer. Not only did this discovery inflame the am- 
bition of the European to extend his sway over the lands 
beyond the sea, it had the further effect of sending him out 
on voyages of exploration into the heavens. Successful 
curiosity begat curiosity. 

The accepted astronomical system of Ptolemy, which had 
the imprimatur of the church, failed to satisfy the more 
acute minds that were studying the movements of the sun, 
the moon, and the stars. The system of Ptolemy placed 
the earth in the center of the universe as a fixed point, and 
caused the sun, moon and stars to revolve around it by 
means of crystal spheres, in cycles and epicycles. The 
phenomena of the passing of the sun through the signs of 
the zodiac, the nodes of the moon, and the procession of 
the equinoxes were all accounted for by an elaborate ma- 
chinery of motions and counter-motions in the crystal 
spheres. This machinery was so complicated, so clumsy, 
that it caused Sancho, King of Aragon, to say to his astron- 
omer that had he been in the councils of the Creator he 
could have suggested simpler methods of regulating the 
heavenly bodies and their movements. 

This dissatisfaction of Sancho with the system of Ptolemy 
was shared by many minds engaged in active search for the 
simpler methods that the King of Aragon desired. Among 



320 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

these explorers of the sky was Nicholas Copernicus, an ob- 
scure Polish priest. After trying patiently, but in vain, 
to make the sun, moon, and stars conform to the system 
of Ptolemy, he finally discarded that system altogether, 
and by a daring flight of intellectual imagination, placed 
himself in the sun and observed the movements of the 
heavenly bodies from that coign of vantage. No sooner 
had he found himself at this new point of observation than 
he perceived that the movements of the celestial orbs were 
simplified and accounted for by making the sun the fixed 
point in relation to the earth and causing the earth to 
travel in a circular path around the sun, as a central body, 
once every year. By a revolution of the earth on its own 
axis, Copernicus accounted for the phenomena of night and 
day; for by this process the earth was constantly putting 
its own bulk between itself and the light, and the darkness 
of night was nothing else than the shadow of the earth. 

Copernicus further observed that certain stars, which 
were called ''planets" or "wandering stars," were, like the 
earth, moving in a circuit round the sun. Some nearer the 
sun than the earth moved within the earth's circuit, others 
farther away described a path far outside that of the earth. 
From all these observations the astronomer concluded that 
the earth (itself a planet or wandering star) was, in obedi- 
ence to some unknown law of motion, moving with other 
planets about their common center. As the final outcome 
of his explorations, Copernicus postulated the Solar Sys- 
tem, consisting of a given number of heavenly bodies in a 
common central control. 

The publication to the world of the results of the ob- 
servations of Copernicus is the beginning, in a rough way, 
of the scientific movement, which from that time, with ac- 
celerating rapidity, has destroyed the ancient and medieval 
conceptions of the universe and has made a new and vaster 
thought-world for the mind of man to live in. 

Copernicus died on the day that the book containing his 
solar theory was placed in his hands ; thus he reaped from 
his labors neither glory nor shame. His book, like all such 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 321 

original works of genius, did not at first attract the atten- 
tion of the world. Only professional astronomers saw its 
significance and mastered its reasoning. The doctors and 
rulers of the church, busy in the administration of ecclesias- 
tical and political affairs, were not alive to the new danger 
that threatened them. It was not until Galileo began to 
teach in Italy the doctrine of the Polish astronomer that 
the authorities of the church became alarmed and endeavored 
to suppress this dangerous heresy. 

Galileo was already a distinguished astronomer; by means 
of the newly invented telescope, he had explored the heavens, 
had discovered the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupi- 
ter. Coming soon to the conclusion that the naked eye of 
man saw only the outer edges of a vast universe, which 
was opened to his gaze by means of the magnifying power 
of the telescopic lens, Galileo embraced the theory of 
Copernicus with ardor, as the only reasonable explana- 
tion of what he had observed in the sky. The earth's 
motion was to him a self-evident fact (he could see it 
move), and when, in the prison of the Inquisition, in or- 
der to save his life, he was forced to deny that motion, 
under his breath he still cried: "It does move." 

The struggle of the old system of astronomy with the 
new was short and sharp. Everywhere the new doctrine 
was received with acclaim by astronomers. Giordano Bruno 
gave to the theory of Copernicus a wider sweep when he 
made the assertion that the fixed stars were so many suns, 
each with its system of planetary worlds. 

In the presence of so stupendous a thought, the little uni- 
verse of theology, — with its definite heaven, its compact 
earth, and its central hell, — ceased to exist; it was lost in 
the grandeur and the sublimity of the Infinite, so suddenly 
uncovered to the gaze of man. 

In vain the church silenced Galileo and burned Giordano 
Bruno in the Piazza del Fiore in Rome. In spite of every 
effort, the system of Copernicus was accepted and perfected 
by each succeeding astronomer. Kepler brought greater 
order into the solar system by substituting the ellipse for 



322 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the circle of Copernicus; Newton welded the whole into 
perfect unity by his discovery of the principle and rule of 
gravity, — thus giving a reasonable explanation to the phen- 
omena of heavenly motions, and so making it impossible 
for the mind to entertain any theory other than that of 
Copernicus. 

Within a century and a half of the death of Copernicus 
the church gave up the battle for Ptolemy as lost, discarded 
his system, and taught in all her schools the doctrine that 
she had once denied and persecuted as destructive of 
her dogma. That she has been able to survive this disaster 
is owing to the fact that the universe of Copernicus is too 
vast for the common mind to live in. It is only the greater 
souls that can look in the face of this Infinite and live. 
Lesser spirits must hide themselves from that face by some 
Mosaic veil, some lesser conception that shall give to them 
a protection from the vastness of the Infinite. 

There are millions to-day who still live in the system 
of Ptolemy, with its stationary earth and moving sun, with 
its nearby heaven and its subterranean hell ; these souls na- 
turally find in the church a shelter from the greatness of 
the world. But such protection is becoming every day more 
and more precarious. The intellect and soul of man is ever 
expanding to accommodate itself to its new and glorious 
habitation. Every year the number of those seeking the 
shelter of the church is decreasing, while those who are 
finding themselves at home in the open are a mighty host, 
rejoicing in their new-found liberty. To them the heavens 
declare the glory of the Infinite and the firmament showeth 
His handiwork. One day telleth another and one night cer- 
tifieth another, and there is neither speech nor language, 
but their voices are heard among them. The Infinitude of 
man is responding to the Infinitude of God. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 323 

CHAPTER LXIV 
The Vision of The Eternal 

The mind of Christian Europe had not yet recovered from 
the shock consequent upon the discovery of new continents, 
and the expansion of the universe into infinite space, before 
it was thrown into a fever of consternation by the assertion 
that the history of this earth extended back into an eternal 
past and had the promise of an eternal future. In the 
presence of this conception, the 4004 B. C. of Bishop Usher's 
chronology, instead of measuring the antiquity of the world, 
did not so much as span the modern era. In the history 
of the human race it was but a moment; in geological time 
but the infinitesimal fraction of an instant. From this 
point of view men reckoned the duration of the earth not in 
years but in aeons ; they spoke not of this or that year 
but of this or that age. 

This revolution in thought was accomplished with less 
spectacular violence than was occasioned by the change 
in the conception of the relation of the earth to the sun. It 
was not so dramatic a transformation, and the general mind, 
after the discovery of America and the acceptance of the 
Copernican theory, was more open to change of view. 

The notion of the earth's antiquity came to the mind 
of man as the result of an investigation into the structure 
of the rock foundations of the earth. In the beginning it 
was an accidental rather than a conscious movement of the 
human intelligence. Thoughtful quarry-men and masons 
found strange forms imbedded in the stones which 
they handled ; they saw the impression of a fish or fern 
outlined in a rock, and they began to speculate as to the 
meaning of these curious plays of nature. The cogitations 
of these unlettered men were reenforced by the more dis- 
ciplined minds of wandering scholars, who found the re- 
mains of marine animals far up the mountain side, hun- 
dreds of miles from any sea. All of this stimulated man's 
unquenchable curiosity, and one after another gave himself 
up to the study of the history of the rocks of the earth. 



324 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

It was not long before the conclusion was forced upon 
the observer that the facts under investigation could not 
be accounted for on the theory that the formation of the 
earth had always been as it is now. The student, as he 
turned over the rocks, read on their surface the account of 
changes vast in their proportions and requiring ages upon 
ages for their accomplishment. The petrified trilobite testi- 
fied to the fact that the uplifted mountain side upon which 
it was found had once been the shore of a sea; the coal 
found in the depths of the earth was seen to be the re- 
mains of submerged forests that at one time had grown 
and flourished on the open ground. These and like discover- 
ies gave to man a new notion of antiquity. He learned that 
the continents, the islands, the rivers, the lakes, and the 
seas that we know are comparatively new to their place ; 
where now is a mountain was once a sea, and the floor of the 
sea was once a mountain-top. Instead of the everlasting 
hills of the Psalmist, it was perceived that the life of a hill 
was, in its degree, as transitory as the life of a man. It 
was here in a geological to-day and gone in a geological 
to-morrow. 

The cause of these changes in the structure of the earth 
was at first ascribed to overwhelming catastrophes which 
has cast down the mountains and uplifted the seas. The 
agents of change were subterranean fires issuing in volcanic 
eruption. But it was soon discovered that, while volcanic 
fire had played its part in the drama of geological history, 
it was by no means the only actor on the stage. The ques- 
tion soon arose as to whether water rather than fire were 
not the hero of the play. If fire had upheaved the moun- 
tains, water had washed them down ; the action of fire was 
sporadic, while that of water was constant. Geologists 
at first divided into the schools of Plutonists and Neptun- 
ists, but were at last reconciled by the discovery that Pluto 
and Neptune were partners in the business of making and 
remaking the rocks of the earth ; for Pluto welded the gran- 
ite, while Neptune laid down the sandstone. It was also 
discovered that Pluto and Neptune were still on the job, — Pluto 
blew the bellows of his forge at Vesuvius and /Etna, while the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 325 

waters of Neptune carried silt down every hillside, to form 
fresh sandstone on the bottom of every sea. It was at last the 
conviction of geologists that past changes in the formation of 
the earth could be accounted for by the operation of present 
forces. This process of change was still going on and could be 
studied on every mountain peak and seashore, and of this 
process the geologist could see "no sign of a beginning, no 
forecast of an end." 1 

The Biblical theologians were bewildered and shocked beyond 
measure by these assertions of the geologists. They could not, 
they would not believe such blasphemies. The Bible said the 
world was made in six days, and what the Bible said must be 
true, for was not the Bible the Word of God? "And let God 
be true and every stone a liar." If the world were of such vast 
antiquity, where, then, did God begin His work of creation? 

For fifty years the pulpit raged against geology as the in- 
vention of Satan ; the fossils were placed in the rocks by God 
to fool the geologists, to their eternal damnation ; to be a geologist 
was to be an atheist. If the world had been torn down and built 
up a thousand times, what was the use of a God? If there had 
never been a creation, where, then, was the Creator? 

In this contention of theology with geology there were no 
imprisonments, no burnings. The geologists were for the most 
part men of the North, where the mind of man had, in a measure, 
been delivered from bondage to ecclesiastical control. 

In due time the theologians found it painful to kick against 
the pricks ; little by little the facts penetrated their own minds 
and could not be ignored. At first the theologian, shifting his 
ground from absolute denial, tried to reconcile geology and 
Genesis. The days of the Bible became the aeons of geology. 
But finding this work of reconciliation mere child's play, the 
clergy gave up the Bible altogether and went over mind and 
soul to geology. And now some of the most ardent and learned 
of geologists are to be found in the ranks of the clergy. 

That Christian men recovered so quickly from the shock 
of geological discovery and displacement, and reconciled their 

1 Lyell's "Principles of Geology." 



326 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

religion to their science, is owing to the psychological fact that 
all past time is equally distant. Memory can as easily (and 
sometimes more easily) recall the happenings of ten years ago 
as the happenings of last week. And in history ten million 
aeons is no more distant than ten thousand years. It requires 
a trained mind and great powers of reflection to grasp the 
significance of the ageless duration of the earth. Such minds, 
which are increasing in number every day, have a vision of 
the Eternal which makes the conception of a definite special 
creation impossible to their thoughts. They do not seek a Cre- 
ator in some past event or future happening. For them Creator 
and Creation are One. 



CHAPTER LXV 

The Making of Man 

The sixth decade of the Nineteenth Century was made for- 
ever famous by the publication of a scientific theory, which, 
even more than the astronomical theory of Copernicus, or Gali- 
leo, or the geological theory of Playfair and Hutton, was at 
war with the theological conception of the universe. In this 
instance, science, leaving the outlying region of the stars and 
coming down from the mountain tops, entered the secret cham- 
bers of life. It began to trace all living forms back to their 
origin and to account for their variations by natural causes. 

The human mind had from the beginning been bewildered by 
the multitude of living creatures that disputed with man the 
possession of the earth. Insect and reptile, bird and beast of 
varied form and habit, met him at every turn, they threatened 
his life by day and disturbed his sleep by night. Some of the 
higher forms of animal life had, indeed, been converted to the 
uses of man ; he had butter and milk from the cattle, wool from 
the sheep, the horse carried him on his journeys, and the dog 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 327 

was his companion in the chase and his guardian in the camp. 
At home and abroad man was in constant contact with this 
multiform animal life. 

As soon as the intelligence of man was sufficiently developed 
he studied the animal world and endeavored to find some ra- 
tional explanation of its origin, — some principle of order in 
the midst of its confusion. In the course of his investigation, 
he found that there were only four or five architectural plans 
employed in the construction of the various animal forms. 
Therefore, he reasoned, the first and obvious effort was to 
classify these creatures according to the basic plan of their 
structure. So they were arranged in the orders of vertebrates, 
molluscs, crustaceans, and the like. But in these genera were 
an almost infinite number of species, and within the species 
still more bewildering varieties. As if living forms were not 
sufficiently confusing, geology must unearth a vast number of 
extinct species, like and yet unlike to existing species. 

After the work of classification was in a measure accom- 
plished, the question of origins forced itself upon the mind of 
the student: How did the various species come into existence? 

To all outward appearances these species were fixed and 
permanent. Each specie continued its kind from generation 
to generation; dog begat dog, man begat man, and there seemed 
no exception to this rule. It was, then, natural to trace dogs 
back to the first dog and men back to the first man. Then 
came the further question: What was the origin of the first 
dog and the first man? 

To this question theology gave the easy answer that the first 
dog and the first man were the creation out of hand of a God. 
With some notable exceptions it was universally held by scien- 
tists and laymen up to the sixth decade of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury that each species of vegetable and animal life was a dis- 
tinct creation. A Being, called "J enovan " or "Elohim" by the 
Jews, (which names, as translated into English, are God and 
Lord) made the various specific forms of animal life one by 
one, endowed each with the power to reproduce its kind, and 
after this manner every living form, from the infusoria to the 
man, came into existence. 



328 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

This creationist theory never found universal acceptance. It 
was not known e primitive man; f sohltfi fixity of 

Spec - ad not entered his mind ; in his thought it was an easy 
thins a man to become a wolf, or a woman a snake; and 

tar from believing that all the species were the c D of 

.. common Great ous gods the work of 

moulding- the forms and giving' life to the various kinds of 
vegetable and animal ex So - one is able to master 

i prehistoric man as we find it expressed in the 
myths that he has k. I wn to history, one gathers that the 

> each order of life its own creative power. 
The god of the S was the species constantly creating and 

re-,- itth found expression in the fetich, in 

the worshi] trees and. animals. 

V ers there was a decided disposition 

to h ctrinc of transformation, and to consider it a p. 

bio thing for one form of life to pass into another; thus, a man 
might become a g and a d g .. man. This is akin to the 

ation of life, or soul, through 
the vario. :s of existence. 

The West derived its hard-and-fast theory of creation 
from } sources. The Hebrew thinkers, unlike the In- 

dian and the Greek philosophers, did not derive mankind by 
generation from the Divine, but b\ creation. God did not 
an. He made him. This thought shaped all the religious 
- of the Hebrew, God to him was not in the world. 
He - f it. — just as a maker is outside his manufac- 

ture. This thought pictures God as a workman in his shop, 
fashioning iect after another and laying each aside when 

finished. \- or moulding his clay on his wheel, each 

sel of I fashioned by the will oi the potter to its de- 

nned use, — some to Ik me to dishonor. 

This theory I ation brought in question the skill and the 

wisdom oi the Ci Why should Infinite Wisdom env. 

the leisure oi His Infinity in creating the vermin and the fly? 
Why should He contrive the tarantula and the Gila mons:. 
These and like perplexities disturbed the mind of the most 
I believer in God as the Creator of the world. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 320 

Beside those moral difficulties, the theory of creation Is be- 
set with intellectual perplexities. The life history o\ the hu- 
man form is an amazing sight to contemplate from the view- 
point of the creationist. Beginning in the slime, a mere cell of 
protoplasm, passing in the embryonic stage through the various 
cycles of animal existence, now breathing through the gills like 
a fish, now shaped like a dog; born helpless, crawling, speech- 
less, evolving through savagery and barbarism to a state o\ man- 
hood consistent with his environment, — the human being by his 
life history accuses his Creator of useless complexity and eon- 
fusion in the manner of his creation. If in the beginning God 
made man by a separate creative act. why did be not make him 
out of hand at once and not squeeze him up from a worm? 

The same query came into the mind of the geologist as he 
studied the fossil species imbedded in the rocks of the earth. 
These species were related to existing species through slight 
variations in form; an extinct species could thus easily he traced 
onward to its living representative. 

Louis Agassiz, — to the day of his death, a profound and 
pious believer in the creationist theory, — ascribed these corres- 
pondences in the forms of extinct and living species to an archi- 
typal plan in the mind of the Creator. But other minds were not 
so easily satisfied. The speculations of Lamark, the observa- 
tion of Erasmus Darwin in the Eighteenth Century, the work 
of Cuvier and others in the province of comparative anatomy, 
and of Linnaeus in the field of botany, prepared the mind of 
the Nineteenth Century for the profound genalization of Dar- 
win and Wallace and for the ready acceptance of their theory 
of the origin of species. 

The word "evolution" was used to express the process by 
means of which the various existing species are derived from 
preexistent forms. According to this theory, the resemblance 
between existing and preexisting species is not accidental but or- 
ganic : it is not the work of a builder building a succession of 
structures according to slightly modified plans, it is the work 
of a living organism adapting itself by successive changes to 
new conditions of existence. According to this theory, man 



330 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

is not a creation, he is a growth. Little by little, by painful 
steps and slow, man has developed from the worm to the human. 

The amazing life history of each individual is but a repe- 
tition of the life history of the race. Each man begins at the 
beginning arid passes through the various stages of ancestral 
experiences ; the worm is man's poor relation, and the monkey 
his cousin a million times removed. 

No revolution in human thinking equals in rapidity and 
completeness the change from the creationist to the evolu- 
tionary theory of the origin of species. In 1850 the whole 
Western world, scientific and theological, was creationist; 
in 1882, when Charles Darwin died, the whole Western world, 
scientific and theological, was evolutionist. The times were ripe 
for the change, and the change came. For a moment the 
theologian sputtered his protest, but his sputterings were 
only the dying gasp of a lost cause; and Charles Darwin, who 
had incidentally but effectually undermined the foundations 
of the theological system, was buried with all honors in the 
Christian church of Westminster. 

The reason of this easy victory of the scientific over the 
theological conception of the origin of the human species 
was that the theological conception had long before lost its 
hold on living thought. Adam, who for so many centuries 
had borne the blame of human sin, had slowly faded away 
into an innocent myth, and with him had gone the whole doc- 
trine of the fall of man, with all its complications and impli- 
cations. Just as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar and stellar 
universe was displaced by the Copernican so the theological 
theory of the creation, the fall and redemption of man, has 
been removed to give room to the evolutionary theory of 
Darwin, which is now, in its fundamental principle, the ac- 
cepted theory of the thinking world. 

It is too soon in the history of the evolutionary move- 
ment to appreciate to the full its effect upon existing be- 
liefs and institutions ; it will take at least another generation 
for this now universally accepted doctrine to work itself out 
to its logical conclusion in the minds of the mass of the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 331 

people. Deep-rooted beliefs die hard; men go on by mere 
vis inertiae, believing they believe long after they have 
ceased to believe. In relation to the doctrine of the fall 
and redemption of man, the formal religious world is now 
in the stage of believing that it believes; the old words are 
used, the old forms observed, but the vigor of life has gone 
out of word and form. It is only by effort that the be- 
lief in the belief is maintained. 

When a man is in his church he may say that he believes 
the archaic form of words, — the dim religious light hides 
from him his own infidelity; but when he comes out in the 
open light of day and buffets with the actual facts of life, his 
belief is not strong enough either to guide his thought or con- 
trol his action. Belief held under such precarious tenure soon 
fades away, and the mind finds its rest in a more stable con- 
ception. 

Among the books that I, when a theological studenr, was 
required to master was Bishop Bull's Treatise on "Man Before 
the Fall." From that profound and learned work I gathered 
that before the disaster in the Garden of Eden man was en- 
dowed with every perfection, — physical, intellectual, and mor- 
al. Erect, noble, good, he stood fearless in the presence of his 
God. But, alas ! beguiled by a woman, deceived by a ser- 
pent, this perfect being lost in a moment all his perfections. 
How such a wise being could be such a fool was a question 
that used often to trouble my mythological understanding. 
But, as everybody believed it, I believed it; and I let it go 
at that. I now see what every one else sees : that "this story 
is not only untrue to fact, — it is absurd. 

What we call the evil in man's life is not the consequence 
of man's fall, it is the result of his rise. Man began not in 
a garden but in a jungle. He did not receive his human 
nature as a hand-me-down, ready-made; he had to make it. 
The belief of primitive man was nearer the truth than the 
later thought of the author of Genesis. Man as he stands 
to-day is not the handiwork of a Creator, he is the product 
of a process. Urge within and force without have driven, 



332 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

beaten, and battered him up from a trilobite to a troubadour 
mat sings his song in my lady's chamber. 

Put scientifically, man has progressed from lower to higher 
forms of life according to fixed laws and by means of resi- 
dent forces. The God of the human species is the God 
Humanus, moulding and shaping the life of man to higher 
ind holier uses. 



CHAPTER LXVI 

The God of the Machine 

When in these days a wayfaring man wishes to go from 
New York to Buffalo, he avails himself of modern methods 
of travel, and if he can, makes the journey by the Em- 
pire State Express. He leaves New York at 8 130 in the 
morning, and arrives in Buffalo at 5 :30 in the afternoon. The 
distance traversed is four hundred and fifty miles. The time 
occupied in transit is nine hours. The economic cost of the 
journey is expressed in the price of the ticket, which is 
thirteen and a half dollars. During his travels the man has 
expended no vital energy, the only weariness incident to his 
task is the weariness of sitting still. 

Had this same wayfaring man made his journey a hun- 
dred years ago he might have traveled by stage coach ; the 
length of time occupied in the journey would have been multi- 
plied by five, and the economic cost by at least an equal 
sum. Had he made his way from the one point to the other 
by means of natural locomotion, his walk would have oc- 
cupied him for the best part of a month, and the economic 
cost would have been not less than one hundred dollars. 
This saving in time and money is the consequence of the ap- 
plication of the forces of nature to human locomotion. We no 
longer use our own inherent locomotive power. In our day 
we do not go from New York to Buffalo, we are carried from 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 333 

the one place to the other. At 8:30 in the morning we place 
ourselves in a long box on wheels called a "car," — that car 
and several others making up a train, — which is hauled by 
means of a locomotive engine driven by the force of heat, ex- 
panding water into steam. The steam engine, together with 
the electric engine, are now the locomotor agency of all man- 
kind. Few of us do any walking, except now and then for 
pleasure. All our serious journeys are made by machinery. 

The age in which we live is the age of the machine. Hu- 
man labor has ceased to be applied directly to the supply of 
human needs. Only in the very coarsest tasks is the muscle 
of man employed directly in the production of human ne- 
cessities. The bread that we eat and the clothes that we wear 
are all machine-made. So perfect has machinery become 
that a loaf of bread never touches a human hand; from 
the time that the wheat is ground until the bread is placed 
on the table the whole work is accomplished by means of 
machinery under human supervision. 

The consequence of this revolution in industry has been 
both the enfranchisement and the enslavement of mankind. 
M'en have been set free from the necessity of arduous, con- 
stant physical labor as a means of achieving a livelihood. 
The back-breaking, heart-breaking tasks are now removed 
from the shoulders of men and are placed upon the shoulders 
of the gods. The forces employed in our machinery are 
the same that are working in that great machine that we call 
Nature. 

The world in which we live, with its earth and sun and moon 
and stars, with its growing trees and running waters, is a vast 
machine. The universe of nature thinks mechanically; it 
reckons in number, weight, and measure; its laws are the 
laws of mechanics. So perfect is this mechanism and so en- 
tirely are the movements of the heavenly bodies under its 
regulation, that we are able to calculate an eclipse of the sun 
by the moon hundreds of years into the future. We can say 
with absolute certainty that in such a year, on such a day, at 



334 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

such an hour, the bulk of the moon will come between the 
earth and the sun. 

So far as we can know, the universe of nature is without 
intelligent purpose and without moral control. We cannot 
say that it intends to do this or that. A loom in our fac- 
tories will, by the forces of the shuttle, weave a garment or 
kill a man with equal indifference, and will never know that 
it has done the one or the other. This whole vast machinery 
that presents itself to our gaze at night, — when we see the 
Great Bear wheeling above and below the horizon, — seems nev- 
er to rise above the consciousness of mere mechanical mo- 
tion. Whatever God there be is the God of the machine; 
and he is (or it is) the machine itself. We sometimes 
speak of the laws of nature as if these heavenly bodies were 
the servants of some celestial Csesar who issued his edict for 
their obedience ; but the more we study and reflect upon na- 
tural phenomena, the more are we convinced that there is 
no such thing as a law of nature external to nature itself. 
What we call the laws of nature are the habits, the customs, 
of nature. These habits and customs are so fixed that they 
are unalterable. They cannot be abrogated by any higher 
power. They cannot be disobeyed. It is this inflexibility 
of natural law that has given the conscious intelligence of 
man its opportunity. Because the forces of nature are con- 
stant, man can by investigation master their ways of work- 
ing and can adapt them to his own uses. All the laws of 
nature inhere in nature itself. Newton did not make the 
law of gravitation, he only discovered it. Man cannot abate 
one jot or one tittle from the least of these laws; his only 
mode of using them is that of exact obedience. Let him err 
hjy a hair's breadth, and nature will not follow him in his 
error. Nature will go on in its own way, heedless of his 
life or death, and his slightest miscalculation may be tatal. 

These forces of nature are not only constant, they are in- 
exhaustible. Man can neither add to nor take away from 
either matter or force. All man can do in the case of mat- 
ter is to change its form, and, in the case of force, to change 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 335 

its mode. The conservation of energy was one of those dis- 
coveries in the natural world which made the Nineteenth 
Century so famous in the history of human thought. It 
was then ascertained that the disappearance of force in one 
mode meant its immediate reappearance in another mode. Mo- 
tion when arrested is transformed into heat. An iron ball 
dropped from a great height, when it strikes the ground, be- 
comes so heated that the hand has knowledge of its warmth 
on touching it. The motion of the ball as a whole has, by 
contact with the earth, been transferred to the motions of 
molecules within the ball itself. When the wave of light 
strikes the eyeball it is transformed into the sense of vision. 
Not one atom of matter nor one particle of force passes out 
of existence. The universe as a whole remains unchanged 
amidst all these changes. What was is, and what is always 
will be. 

Man is not at the end, he is only at the beginning of the 
conscious application of natural force to human uses. Vast 
regions of nature are still unexplored, secret forces are in 
existence, and it only requires that man shall continue his 
conscious effort to know nature, in order that he may ac- 
quire from nature a vaster power for a mightier life. As 
it is, by this method he has enfranchised himself to a de- 
gree that he hardly appreciates as yet. 

Professor Simon Patten, in his "New Basis of Civiliza- 
tion," expounded the significant doctrine that by means of 
machinery the human race had passed from a chronic deficit 
to a chronic surplus. Prior to the use of machinery man- 
kind lived always at the point of starvation. The human race 
multiplied rapidly; but because of a lack of food supply, it 
perished with equal rapidity, and the birth-rate had great 
difficulty in keeping ahead of the death-rate. Since the use 
of machinery for the provision of human needs, the human 
race has increased with marvelous rapidity. England, at the 
beginning of the Nineteenth Century, had a population of 
little more than ten millions. Its population now is up- 
wards of forty millions. During the Nineteenth Century the 



336 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

American Continent was populated (largely at first) by na- 
tural increase. Emigrants poured into America from West- 
ern Europe, and the population in Western Europe increased 
instead of decreasing, as naturally it ought to have done. This 
multiplication of the human race, whether for good or evil, 
is the work of the god of machine. This god, tireless in its 
energy, rests not day nor night when called to labor for those 
who obey his laws and so secure his favor. The human ele- 
ment in modern industry is only the intelligence of the hu- 
man consciousness, guiding the machine that man has made, in 
order that it may comply with the laws of the greater ma- 
chine, which is the product of nature. One man at a ma- 
chine does the work of from ten to twenty pairs of hands ; 
this process is in course of constant improvement, and man's 
intelligent mastery of the secrets of nature may mean his 
perfect enfranchisement. It already should accomplish the 
proper feeding and clothing and housing of every human 
being. By means of the weapons now at his command, man 
may as soon as he so desires, make war on poverty and abolish 
that baleful disease of human society, thus making poverty 
with the squalor and misery that always follow in its camp, 
as remote to the people of all lands as the wolves that once 
infested their forests. 1 

But while man's adaptation to his uses of the forces of na- 
ture has in it these possibilities of enfranchisement, it is the 
deplorable fact that up to this time the consequence of his 
inventions has been the greater enslavement of the vast mass 
of the people. John Stuart Mill has said that it is doubt- 
ful if all the inventions (which are many) made in his time 
had lightened the task of a single laborer. One might go 
further than the great philosopher and say that these inven- 
tions, so far from lessening the toil of the working class, 
have increased their burden and made it more irksome, more 

1 These words are an adaptation from the closing words of the 
speech of David Lloyd George made on the 9th of April, 1909, 
when he presented his famous budget of that year for the con- 
sideration of the House of Commons. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 337 

degrading, more destructive of humanity than all the toil 
of the ages that preceded the advent of the machine. 

The god of the machine, as we have seen, is without moral 
sense. He does his work irrespective of the consequences that 
it may have upon the lives of those for whom he toils. 
The taking of the laborer from the open field, of the handi- 
craftsman from his cottage in the village, and massing these 
in vast factories, has had a woeful, depraving effect upon 
the nature of man. It has deprived him of much that is 
essential to his well-being. 

A hundred years ago the wayfaring man making his journey 
from New York to Buffalo, would indeed have occupied a 
month's time, would have spent upon the journey at least 
a hundred dollars, and would day by day have exhausted vi- 
tal energy, but he would have gained more than he lost. 
During the month occupied in walking from the Bay to the 
Lake, he would have become familiar with the wonderful 
scenery through which he passed. He never would have 
thought of the fatigue of his journey, because of its ab- 
sorbing interest. Every moment would have been a mo- 
ment of delight. The seeing eye and the hearing ear would 
have been charmed by color and music; the varying land- 
scape would have led him on and on; as a consequence of 
his journey, he would have had an expanded mind; and un- 
less he were a dumb fool he would at its end have been a 
better and a greater man. His muscular nature, too, as well 
as his intelligence, would have been vastly benefitted by the 
exercise. 

Nature made man a walking animal, and by walking man 
assumes that form of activity that is most requisite to keep 
him in perfect health, A man who walks ten miles a day in 
the open need not fear old age. If he have simple food to 
eat and water to drink he can laugh to scorn the Psalmist's 
three score years and ten. The whole tendency of the use 
of machinery for purposes of locomotion is to dwarf the in-- 
telligence, to deaden the emotion, and to weaken the muscles. 
The man under these circumstances is the slave of the ma- 



338 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

chine, and if that slavery continues long enough, the victim 
loses all power of freedom, he can no longer walk, he must 
be carried, and mankind at large is rapidly nearing that de- 
plorable condition. Walking is becoming a lost art, and the 
man who walks is notable among his fellows. 

Not only have we machines to walk for us but we also 
have machines to think for us, to write for us, to sing for 
us, and there is little left of human endeavor to-day, be- 
cause of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of 
the god of the machine. At the present moment, while I am 
dictating these words to a machine, the whole world is en- 
gaged in a war the most destructive of life and property that 
the world has ever seen. The armies of this war are numbered 
by the million, the battle fronts extend for hundreds of miles, 
and the battles last not for days, but for months and almost 
for years. For nearly three years now there has been a con- 
tinuous battle between the Germanic and Allied armies along 
the Western front of the war. This war is made possible sim- 
ply and solely because it is not primarily a war between men 
and men, but a war between machines. All the ancient pride, 
pomp, and circumstance of war is gone. The Knight no longer 
rides at arms; no more does the soldier follow the colors; no 
more does the bugle blow; but dull gray men in dull gray 
ditches handle vast machines, project explosive gases, and rush 
in desperation from one trench to another, perishing by the 
thousand where aforetime scarcely a score had died. Unless 
the intelligence of man can devise some method whereby 
to check the devastating power of the war machine, the end 
of the human race is in sight. Instead of man mastering 
the machine, the machine is mastering man and working his 
destruction. 1 

There is a constant tendency in the universe toward the 
machine. Human organizations are subject to this tendency. 
In politics and in religion we have the machine, — an or- 
ganization that works almost automatically in its own in- 

'These words were dictated to a machine on the 30th of June, 
1917, when the news had just arrived of the landing of American 
armies in France. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 339 

terest, without intelligence, and without moral sense. The 
great nations of the world are little else than machines. They 
act in contradiction to the intelligence and the conscience. 
And the same is true of the religious organizations now in 
existence. The greatest of all these religious organizations, 
the Catholic Church, is to-day little else than a worn-out 
machine. It has lost all power of intelligent adaptation or 
moral cooperation with the existing world. Men in every 
country where it has been dominant, as in Mexico, in Italy, 
and elsewhere, are scrapping it as useless. 

The various Protestant denominations are likewise machines. 
They do not think, they follow custom ; and to follow cus- 
tom is of the very essence of the nature of the machine. Na- 
ture does not think intellectually, only mechanically. And 
just as soon as any organization is perfected it is a ma- 
chinery to be used so long as it is useful, and then to be 
cast aside. The great problem of the immediate future is 
to bring the god of the t machine under the dominion of the 
god of the moral order. Man must not be mastered by the 
machine; he must, by his intelligence and his moral appre- 
hension, command his tool. 



CHAPTER LXVII 

The God of the Market 

By one of those curious transformations so common in re- 
ligious history, Jesus the son of Joseph, called the Christ, who 
was the god of the catacombs, worshipped by the slaves, the 
beggars, the thieves, the harlots of ancient Rome, as their 
Lord and Saviour, — has become in our day the God of the 
Market. Evangelical Christianity is that form of religion 
most patronized by the business man. If it were not for 
this class Evangelical Christianity could not survive for a 



340 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

day. It is the commercial element that builds and maintains 
its churches, employs its ministers, sends its missionaries to 
every land to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. One 
of the greatest, if not the greatest, financier of modern times 
began his will, dispensing his immense fortune, with the di- 
rection that his heirs should employ their lives and his wealth 
for the maintenance of the Gospel of Christ in the world. 

The first billionaire in history, a man of business genius 
unequaled in any age. is a most devout believer in and earn- 
est supporter of the Baptist form of faith. The Young Men's 
Christian Association, with all its vast equipment and means 
of usefulness, is the foundation of the merchant class, and is 
used by them for the furtherance of that form of religion 
which they patronize. No man can be a voter in that As- 
sociation who is not a professed member of some Evangelical 
body. 

This dominance of the business element is seen in all the 
workings of the Evangelical churches. They are on a busi- 
ness basis ; pews in the houses of worship are rented and 
sold on the same principle as stalls in the market, the better 
place bringing the higher price. The clergy in these churches 
are ranged as fifteen-thousand, ten-thousand, five-thousand, one- 
thousand-dollar men and under, and each man's ecclesiastical 
importance is measured by the amount of his ecclesiastical 
income: The principle of competition rules in the religious as 
it does in the business world. The ministers are in competition 
all the time for the better churches and the higher salaries. 
A church in need of a pastor bids for him in the market just 
as the merchant in need oi a clerk bids foi 4 him in the market. 
Money is the measure of success in the church as it is in the 
world. A minister who can draw an audience and secure 
from that audience liberal contributions is sure of promotion ; 
the highest places in the church are within his reach. In 
every respect the church and the world are alike, — both have 
been commercialized by the commercial class. 

Jesus the Christ is the central Divinity in this scheme of 
worship. God the Father is remote to the thought of the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 341 

Evangelical. He is a God who sits aloft creating and judg- 
ing mankind, but having no intimate relation with the life of 
the people. All the hymns in these churches that are popu- 
lar with the people are hymns addressed to Jesus. "Jesus 
saviour of my Soul," is in the heart and on the lips of every 
devout evangelical Christian. To Jesus is ascribed the most 
important of all divine functions, that of saving the people 
from their sins and conferring upon them the gift of Eternal 
Life. 

When we analyze the foundations of evangelical belief, we 
get a clue to this strange situation. At first we are perplexed 
to an extreme to understand how it has come to pass that the 
Jesus of whom we read in the Gospels, whose whole life and 
teaching was a continual protest against every principle of 
commercialism, has come to be the god of commerce. Ac- 
cumulation is the fundamental postulate of the commercial 
creed. To lay by in store is taught as the virtue of virtues. 
A man without a surplus capital has no standing in the market ; 
and yet Jesus condemns all accumulation as faithlessness in 
Divine Providence. Accumulation in his sight is a sin; 
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." Not only 
is it a sin, it is folly. Jesus would have men to be as the 
flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, dependent upon 
the daily ministrations of nature for their daily bread. His 
prayer for bread is limited for the day, — it knows no to- 
morrow. When he was alive here in the earth (if we may 
believe what is told of him) his anger was fierce against 
those who "devour widows' houses and who for a pretence 
make long prayers." 

The explanation of this patronage of Jesus by the mer- 
chants is to be found in the fact that the Jesus of the Mar- 
ket is not the Jesus of the Gospel. He is the Christ of 
the Evangelical creed, and the Christ of the Evangelical 
creed is the center of religious exchanges. The Evangelical 
has made with the Christ of the creed a bargain similar to 
that made by Jacob with Jehovah. He says to his God 
Jesus, as he calls him: "If thou wilt be with me in the way 



342 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

that I go and bring me to my father's house in peace, if 
thou wilt secure for me the forgiveness of my sins and the 
blessings of eternal life, then thou shalt be my God and of 
all that thou givest me I will give thee the tenth." 

The Evangelical faith is in this respect Hebraistic. The 
relation of the worshipper to his God is not organic, it is 
contractual. It is the religion of the covenant, — so much for 
so much, — and it is to be said for the evangelical that he is 
true to his bargain. Trusting to Jesus for the fulfillment of 
his part of the contract, his worshipper gives freely of his 
wealth, even to the tenth, to promote the preaching of Jesus 
as the Christ in the world, and to sustain his worship. Mil- 
lions are poured out every year in this religious enterprise. 
Evangelical ministers and missionaries penetrate to every 
portion of the earth, and their source of supply is the wealth 
accumulated in the market. 

If Jesus were as a man, with the feelings common to 
man, he might well be proud of his present preeminence. 
His promotion from the godship of the beggar to the god- 
ship of the merchant prince might well seem to him an as- 
surance of his success in the universe. He no longer is 
poorer than the bird of the air and the fox in the thicket, 
having no place to lay his head; he is housed magnificently in 
palaces on the wealthiest thoroughfares in the wealthiest cities 
in the world. It is not the men and the women, who out of the 
simplicity of their hearts know no better that sing his praises 
in rude form as they march in and out through the catacombs, 
but the most highly trained voices, the most expensive musi- . 
cal instruments are employed in his divine worship. He does 
not have to hide his head for fear; he can show himself 
openly in the seats of the elders, and he is welcome to the 
highest place in the synagogue. He is to-day no less a per- 
son than the God of the Market; and to-day the market rules 
the world. 

The market is one of the most wonderful contrivances de- 
vised by the wisdom of man for the accomplishment of his 
well-being in the earth. Before the day of the market each 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 343 

man had to provide as best he could his whole means of liveli- 
hood. He had to dig with his own fingers the roots that he 
ate, and catch with his own hand the prey that he devoured; 
he had to skin the beasts and cure the hides to cover his 
nakedness; he had to build for himself the hut that shel- 
tered him, or find refuge in a cave of the earth. By means 
of the market, man has escaped from this condition of pov- 
erty. Each man has come to labor not only for himself 
but for his fellow-man. 

Man might almost be called a commercial animal. From 
the very first the instinct of the trader has been manifest in 
him, — an instinct that is found nowhere else that we know 
of in all the universe. The expert fisherman, catching more 
fish than he needed for his own use, exchanged his surplus 
with a skilful hunter or a patient husbandman, and so se- 
cured a more varied food supply. We may, indeed, see 
the beginnings of the market system in the pack that com- 
bines to hunt the common prey, but we do not have here 
any exchange, we only have the principle of the common weal 
as the outcome of the common labor. 

By this contrivance of the market, man has brought about 
that division of labor which is the source, really, of his wealth. 
Each man, each community, does that which it can do to the 
best advantage, and then exchanges the surplus of its product 
with other communities, obeying the same law of labor. Wine- 
raising countries exchange the fruit of the grape for the 
wheat that grows on the upland. This system has become so 
organized that to-day the market is coextensive with the 
world. 

From the beginning commerce has been the builder of cities 
and empires. Tyre and Carthage, Venice and London, all 
owe their greatness to their commercial supremacy. Each in 
its day was and is the market town of the world. Without 
the market it would not be possible for mankind to over- 
spread the earth as he is doing now. It is the accumulated 
commercial capital of London that has opened up the prairies 
of Canada to the Englishman and the pampas of Argentina 



344 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

to the Italian. This capital has delivered millions from the 
slums of London, Naples, and New York, and given them 
the free, open, independent life of the country. 

When we consider what the market has done for mankind, 
we are at a loss at first to understand why it is that none 
of the greater and older gods were ever gods of the 
market. Uranus, as we have learned, was the god of space, 
Chronos of time, Zeus of the city, Jehovah of the tribe, Jesus 
in his day the Divinity of the people, Mary the goddess of 
consolation. Not one of these but would have been insulted 
to have been called the god of the market. To find com- 
mercial divinities, we must descend to Beelzebub, Mammon, 
Biliken, and Mercury, and of these the only one having any 
claim to respectability is the last, who was known in ancient 
mythology as the god of thieves, — and merchants. 

From the very first a disgrace has attached to the mar- 
ket. The word trader and traitor are derived from the same 
root. Even to our own day it was a shame for an English- 
man to be a tradesman; such a man had to take off his hat 
and stand humbly in the presence of his superiors. Here 
again we are at a loss at first for a reason that will ade- 
quately account for the phenomenon. 

The disrepute of the market lies in the motive of the 
market. The primary purpose of a mercantile transaction 
is not human service but commercial gain. Profit is of the es- 
sence of mercantile life. The capitalist who lends his money 
in London does not do so primarily for the purpose of open- 
ing up new countries and benefitting contracted lives; his 
act is not one of beneficence but of business. He puts his 
money out at interest, and it is what his money earns for 
him, not what his money does in and of itself, that concerns 
him. He will lend it as readily to destroy and enslave a people 
as he will to promote their well-being. The market buys 
and sells whatever is in demand: wheat, coal, iron, a child's 
life, a woman's virtue, are all put up in the market indif- 
ferently for the price they will bring. The God of the Mar- 
ket, like the God of the Machine, has neither higher intelli- 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 345 

gence nor moral sense; his intelligence being the intelligence 
of the market, and his morality the morality of the market. 
The merchant who fails to meet his engagements is con- 
demned; the merchant who is smart and overreaches and gets 
the best of the bargain is commended. The ruin of a rival 
is the crowning glory of the man of the market. In its own 
vernacular, one man "does" another, and the man who "does" 
is acclaimed for his business ability. 

The market corrupts religion, depraves literature, and de^- 
bases art. The teacher, the preacher, the artist, is employed 
by the merchant class to preach commercialism as the high- 
est, best, noblest way of living. The preacher and the 
teacher must not speak as they think, but they must express 
the thought of the market. The artist must portray not the 
miseries of the poor, but the gorgeous well-being of the 
rich. He must paint their divinities in the likeness of his 
patron. During the Renaissance the artists were in the em- 
ploy of the great commercial cities, the merchants them ? 
selves for the most part being the patrons. The Popes who 
made a trade of their religion in that age, vied with the 
merchant in securing the services of the great geniuses of 
the age. I cannot recall any picture of poverty (as it ex- 
isted at that time in those centers of life) on the canvas of 
any great artist. The models for the Madonnas of Ra- 
phael are the women of the leisure class, and all the figures 
that surround this central divinity, to whose glory he devoted 
his genius, are the wealthy men of the time, — the men who 
paid him to paint the picture. It would have been well for 
the world if Raphael could have given us at least one pic- 
ture of one leper, of whom there were a multitude at that 
time in the highways and byways of Italy. All the squalor, 
all the misery, of the period goes unrecorded, and we have 
perpetual Madonnas repeated perpetually for the glorification 
of the wealthy and the leisure class. 

In our own day our merchants are eager to possess the 
paintings of these old masters; but not one of them employs 
an artist to go down into the highways and byways of life 



346 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

as it is in the modern world and picture it as they see it. 
Once in a while a great master does this of his own ac- 
cord, and his paintings hang unsold upon the walls of his 
own studio. They have no market price. The commercial 
world knows of nothing but commercial values. 

I heard a celebrated business man (an advertiser,- by the, 
way, and a brilliant speaker) say to an audience that money 
is the measure of ability and success; that a man who had 
ability could use it in the commercial world to secure for 
himself the rewards of that world and amass a fortune. And 
no one questioned the assertion, for it is a truism in the 
market. Therefore, according to this principle, the courtesan 
who sells her favors to the highest bidder is a woman of 
greater ability than the virtuous housewife who labors early 
and late in the interests of her household. The prophet who 
prophecies smooth things, and in consequence draws his 
salary of fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year, is an 
abler man than a rugged and rude John who preaches in 
the wilderness, living on locust and wild honey. 

It is the profit system that makes the market what it is, — 
a disgrace to humanity. Every great commercial center has 
always been a center of social corruption. Tyre sold a 
boy for a harlot and traded the virtue of a woman for a 
gem. England has depraved its working class in the in- 
terests of its commercial prosperity. New York is more 
noted for its Great White Way than it is for its many 
noble charities. Its Great White Way is the natural product 
of its commercialism, while its institutions of charity are the 
outcome of an effort to stay some of the greater evils of the 
commercial system. It is the market that is the efficient cause 
of that deadly disease poverty that has afflicted mankind since 
the beginning of his social life on the earth, and unless the 
market can be regulated and its greater abuses abated, it will 
destroy present civilization, as it has destroyed ancient civiliz- 
ations. London is to-day in its death-throes because of the 
terrific abuses that have been permitted to prevail in the 
business life of the nation. If England is to recover, it can 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 347 

only be by the stern elimination of the practices hitherto 
permitted, whereby one man and one class has been allowed 
to exploit another man and another class in its own interests. 
The landlord, the money monger, must be brought under 
the influence of a higher law than that of the market. 

Behind the market is the great army of producers who are 
compelled to bring their product to the market, there to sell 
it at the market price. It is to the interests of the merchant 
to buy at the lowest possible price. He takes advantage of 
every glut, to secure the product at a sum that may be 
ruinous to the producer. In front of the market is the 
consumer who must buy at the market price; and here again 
the self-interest of the market man leads him to put upon the 
product the highest price that the business will bear. He has 
no consideration whatever for the necessities of the purchaser; 
for all he cares, the consumer may starve and freeze; he 
will have his price. It is this man between who has through 1 - 
out history absorbed a vastly undue share of the common 
wealth. He has been the merchant prince, living in luxury, 
clothing his wife and daughters in costly apparel, adorning 
them with jewels, turning human labor into channels for his 
own aggrandizement, and all the while, within his sight, 
great masses of people have been starving for the necessi- 
ties of life. The God of the Market is like the God of 
the Machine, without pity, without morality. He will have 
his pound of flesh no matter what may happen to Antonio. 

The only salvation for mankind is the substitution of the 
community itself for the middleman. The market cannot with 
safety be left any longer in private control. The producer and 
the consumer must combine to secure to themselves the 
values that are properly theirs. The market has become so 
vast in its operations, — each man is so entirely dependent 
upon it, — that it has become in private hands a despotism, 
destructive of all liberty. For a bare livelihood the great 
mass of mankind to-day must cringe and fawn before those 
who are in possession of the sources of wealth and means of 
distribution ; for the market owns the one and controls the 
other. 



348 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

The revolution now impending is not a political but an 
industrial revolution. It is the redemption of the market 
from under bondage to the merchant class. The merchant 
must no longer be the master but the servant of the seller 
and the buyer. 

The principles of Jesus the Son of Joseph, if applied to the 
market, would heal its sickness. He makes the basic prin- 
ciple of the market to be not profit but service. The mer- 
chant holds the same place in the economic world as that 
held by the minister in the spiritual world. He is to dis- 
tribute to the people the goods committed to his care. 
This task of distribution has its payment not in a profit but 
in a wage. The man is not to buy and sell with a view 
to his own enrichment, but is to have constantly in mind 
the necessities of the people. This conception of the market 
is so foreign to the present mind that it is absurd; but, 
nevertheless, it is the true conception. Jesus forbids the 
accumulation of riches ; nor does he do so as a mere vision- 
ary, ignorant of the world in which he lives, but because 
with his prophetic insight he saw that if the market were 
properly managed, if the industrial products of the world 
were properly distributed, there would be no necessity 
for such accumulation. The great mass of the people depen- 
dent on the market are unable to accumulate. Each day's 
wage purchases each day's supplies, and these live as do 
the fowl of the air and the flower of the field. Only the few 
contravene this law of daily providence, and endeavor 
to forestall the market and secure for themselves and their 
households an abundance of goods sufficient not only for the 
day but as far as possible for all time. It is this false 
conception of the market that is the fruitful source of the 
major evils of our time. Because of this we have the 
miseries of the poor and the debaucheries of the rich ; we 
have the degradation of the menial and the insolence of the 
master. 

If Jesus is to come to his own as the God of the Market, 
then his ministers must preach in season and out of season 
his economic doctrine. They must lay stress continually on 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 349 

the sin of covetousness as the great idolatry, — as the final 
denial of God. Until this is done, the present fantastic form 
of homage will continue, and we shall see the worship of 
Christ degraded to the level of the worship of Biliken. The 
redemption, however, is at hand, and the God of the Market 
as well as the God of the Machine is coming under the domin- 
ion of the God Humanus, whose legend is not "Get!" but 
"Give!" 



CHAPTER LXVIII 
The God Humanus 

Looking down on the face of his dead daughter, a wo- 
man of rare mental and physical endowments, — who, after 
a long and painful illness, had just died in the prime of her 
young womanhood, — a celebrated scientist made answer to 
a friend offering him conventional words of religious com- 
fort: 

"I find no evidence of any feeling of compassion in the 
universe outside the nature of man. If a man is to be com- 
forted in his sorrow, he must find the source of comfort 
in himself." 

While this scientist, in the extremity of his grief, may 
have overstated the case, he did, without doubt, give words 
to a thought that lies heavy on every human heart. When, 
in the freshness of a great sorrow, one is told to seek com- 
fort from God, one can but cry with the Patriarch Job : 

"O, that I knew where I might find Him that I might 
come unto His seat. Behold I go forward, he is not there. 
And backward, but I cannot perceive Him." 

The indifference of nature to our human grief never fails 
to astonish us — that the sun should shine and the birds sing 
while our hearts are breaking seems to us but in mockery 
of our sorrow. Burns has made this the theme of the sad- 
dest and yet the loveliest of his songs: 



350 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, 

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair; 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 

And I sae weary fu' o' care? 
Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, 
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn, 
That minds me o' departed joys, 
Departed, never to return. 

There is something in human grief that seems alien to 
nature. Nature can be sad, but never sorrowful. Human 
sorrow has in it not only the sense of loss but also the added 
sense of injustice. It seems that God is not only hard but 
unjust as well. Thinking of his indifference, we cry with 
Martha : 

"Lord, if Thou hadst been here my brother had not died." 

Thinking of God's injustice we are prone to utter the re- 
proach of the widow of Serepta to Elijah: 

"What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God, art 
thou come to call my sins to remembrance and to slay my 
son?" 

The injustice and cruelty of life make belief in the bene- 
ficence of God hard for the human heart. 

The scientist's grief was not more for the loss of his 
daughter than it was for his daughter's loss of the oppor- 
tunities and joys of her womanhood. His grief was not 
selfish, it was sympathetic ; and this sympathetic grief is 
purely human. It is only man that follows his dead into 
their graves and seeks by his ministrations to bring some 
comfort into their dark and lonely abode. It is only the 
young of our race that are mourned after they are lost. 
The leaves fall from the tree and the tree does not regard 
it ; the youngling drops from the nest and is straightway 
forgotten ; but human love goes after its dead to the 
portals of the tomb, and will not let them go. 

In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and great weeping, 
Rachel weeping for her children, and refused to be comforted because 
they are not. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 351 

It can be safely said that sympathetic grief can, so far as 
observation goes, be found nowhere in the universe but 
in the heart of man. 

Not only is nature irresponsive to the grief of man, but 
it is also indifferent to his moralities. It is a matter of 
no account to nature if a child is the product of a lawful 
marriage or an adulterous connection ; when once a child is 
begotten, nature pursues its even way, often giving to the 
love child more than it gives to the child of marriage. 
Nor does nature intervene to wither the hand that holds 
the murderous knife, — the knife might be cutting the wood 
of a tree rather than the flesh of a man for all that the 
forces of nature care. The knife is sharp and the arm is 
strong, and the use it is put to does not concern the sharp- 
ness of the knife nor the strength of the arm. Nature as 
nature has no moral sense. Conscience, with its restrain- 
ing power, is an attribute, so far as we can see, of mankind 
alone. 

There is yet another human quality that has given man 
a unique place in the world, — man, far beyond any other 
creature, possesses the power of reasoning, having evolved 
an intelligence that can see before and after. By the use 
of this acquirement, he can shape himself to his environ- 
ment and his environment to himself. It is this power that 
has given man the mastery of the earth and made him at 
home in every climate. By the use of his particular gift 
of purposeful reason, man has tamed the strength of the 
horse, has domesticated the cattle and the sheep, has of a 
crab-apple produced a pippin, and of the wild rose the 
American beauty; has built for himself houses and planted 
for himself gardens. Man clothes himself with his own 
thought and decorates himself with his own designs. We 
do not find conscious intelligence so developed elsewhere 
as it is in man. 

Man has these three qualities, — implicit it may be in 
nature, explicit only in himself: the power of sympathy; 
the sense of right ; the gift of self-direction. Because man 
has these three peculiar possessions, he is what he is, — 



352 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

a sensitive, moral, reasonable being. And as these are 
more or less highly developed, so does a man live on a 
higher or lower plane of existence, so is he either a thing 
or a person. A man of cold temperament, feeble of con- 
science and of undeveloped intelligence, has not yet at- 
tained to his humanity; his life is not yet conscious, but 
drags along in the unconscious mire of natural force. 

John Fiske has told us that human progress was con- 
tingent on the length of human infancy. The love of the 
mother for the child was engendered not only by the in- 
timate connection of the womb and the breast but by the 
force of habit. Mother care, which is the source of mother 
love, was exercised not merely for weeks and months but 
for years, until by wont it became of the very nature of 
the mother life, and from the mother passed into the 
possession of the race. 

This growth of sympathy created the human institutions 
of the tribe, — the family and the state. By means of these 
organizations man sought to secure for his young shelter 
against the ills of life. Sympathy when thus developed 
went out not only to one but to all the children, so that 
childhood as such was protected by the common love. 
The mother cared most for her own child; but the mother- 
hood in her embraced not only a child, but childhood. 
Witness the fondness of the girl for the doll. 

The extension of the area of sympathetic love has marked 
the progress of humanity from the wild to the civilized 
state. Beginning with the mother and the child, it in- 
cluded within the circle of its warmth the members of the 
family, of the community, of the state, and of the race. Man 
has at last reached the sympathetic stage of development in 
which it is impossible for him to witness the distress of any 
fellow-creature without a spasm of sympathy. When one 
can look on suffering in any form with utter indifference 
one has in so far ceased to be human. 

It was the exercise of sympathy that gave rise to the 
moral sense. The wilful infliction of pain was resented 
as monstrous; he who could torture a child was not a man 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 353 

but a brute, whose actions called for condemnation in the 
interests of the social order. Since frail children cannot 
live in a world of unrestrained unkindness, men came to 
think of unkindness in terms of morality: an unkind act 
was not only painful to its object, it was wrong in its agent; 
as the word implies, it was destructive of kin. Conscious 
unkindness made family, community and state impossible; 
because all these institutions are disrupted and dissolved 
by continued cruelty. So the cruel man, the murderer, 
the robber, the adulterer (who respectively indulged his 
hate, his greed, his lust at the cost of pain to his victims) 
was called a bad man, and as such was subject to the loss 
of his own life, his own property, his own wife and chil- 
dren. The moral sense in man has its root in grief. In 
proportion to his power of sympathetic grief is his sense 
of righteousness. Of the righteous servant of the Lord 
it is said : "He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with 
grief." 

It is to his grief also that man, in a large measure, owes 
the development of his purposeful intelligence. Intelli- 
gence is man's defensive armor against the cruelties that 
beset him. By his purposeful intelligence he defends him- 
self from the extremities of heat and cold; he lays by fuel 
for the winter and ice for the summer. To ward off the 
horrors of starvation, man has contrived the plow and 
the harrow, the cultivator and the thresher. To assure 
himself against the woes of poverty, he has devised govern- 
ments and laws, and has sheltered himself behind the pro- 
tection of States. The fear of want haunts the millionaire 
as well as the pauper and stirs him to intellectual activity. 
It is, in a degree, because a man's fear of deprivation passed 
out beyond himself to his children and his grandchildren 
that we have had all the vast improvements in commercial 
and industrial activities. It is true that men have come 
to enjoy these activities for their own sakes, but they had 
their origin in his desire that his children should not come 
to want. Human nature, as distinct from animal nature, 
has been forged in the fires of human affliction. Out of 



354 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

his grief man has derived his sympathy, his morality, and 
his wisdom. 

Sorrow has not only been man's teacher, it has been his 
maker. Because of this, the old theologies are right in 
thinking of affliction as a visitation of God. They were 
wrong in thinking of such visitation as a visitation of 
wrath. Sympathy, righteousness, and wisdom are divine 
powers exercised by and through human nature. The love 
of God, the righteousness of God, and the wisdom of God 
are known to us only as we see them, as Human love, 
Human righteousness, Human wisdom ; and because of this, 
God and Humanity are One. 

The salvation of the world lies in the recognition of this 
truth. The forces of man's redemption from cruelty, ini- 
quity, and folly are to be found in the nature of man. Both 
the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil are within 
us ; out of our hearts proceed the issues of life and death. 
Only human compassion can stay the course of human 
cruelty; only human righteousness can curb human ini- 
quity, only human wisdom can cure human folly. 

On the battle-fields of Europe we have all witnessed a 
gigantic struggle of natural cruelty, injustice, and folly 
against human sympathy, justice, and wisdom. Man is 
akin to the beast and the god. In Christendom the beast 
has broken loose and defied the god. Physical force, with 
its utter indifference to pain and loss, is under the control 
of highly developed intelligence fighting for the possession 
of the earth. It is as if the tigers of the jungle, equipped 
with the mind of man had broken loose to over-run the 
world. Such beasts have no comprehension of human 
values. The lives of children, the chastity of women, treas- 
ures of art, — all are nothing to them but obstacles in the 
way of their conquest. They come upon a field of growing 
grain and leave it a trampled waste; they come upon a 
beautiful city and leave it a hopeless ruin; they come upon 
a virtuous woman, and leave her an involuntary harlot. 
When we look upon such widespread, wasteful cruelty 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 355 

we despair of our race which is ceasing to be human and 
is merging itself with the non-human elements of nature, — 
cruel of necessity, and having no heart of compassion. 

But while we are thus despairing over unspeakable 
cruelties, we are beholding a manifestation of human sym- 
pathy that secures our faith in our humanity against all 
future doubt. Men and women far removed from the 
scenes of conflict, outside the sphere of its operations, are 
giving of their substance and their lives in the cause of 
their compassion ; they are flocking by the thousands and 
the hundreds of thousands to rescue and nurse the wound- 
ed ; to feed the hungry and comfort the dying. The contri- 
bution of the American people to the relief of the sufferers 
in the European War is unparalleled in human compassion. 
Every one has made an offering great or small to aid these 
victims of man's cruelty. Our young men have gone as 
stretcher-bearers ; our young women as nurses, and these 
have been subject to all the perils of war. We of America 
have taken sides in this war, the side of compassion against 
cruelty, of life against death. 

And this is not the end. The war will be followed by 
a reaction against the horrors, the cruelties, the abomina- 
tions of war such as will make such a war impossible for 
generations, if not forever. Out of this great grief will 
come an increase of compassion. 

A like reaction against the horrible injustice of the War 
will go far to remove one of its efficient causes. All man- 
kind will learn, as from a fearful moving picture, that the 
safety of a people does not lie in the greatness of the 
State. The great States, those that are reckoned as first- 
class powers, are in this war the victims of their great- 
ness: Germany with its mighty army, England with its 
great navy, are in deadlock, and the youthful life of these 
militant and naval countries is being crushed out of exis- 
tence by their impact, while little Holland and Switzer- 
land, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are being saved from 
the greater calamities of these calamitous times. England 
is paying dear for her naval supremacy, Germany for her 



356 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

military might, and are verifying the saying of Jesus: 
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." 

The human sense of justice is in rebellion against the 
horrible injustice of a system that is the occasion of so 
great a catastrophe. It is impossible that the state sys- 
tem of Europe should survive the present war. It is 
shocking to the sense of justice in man that one who calls 
himself an emperor or a king should hold in the hollow of 
his hand the peace of the world and be able, by the signing 
of his name, to launch evils so fearful upon innocent people. 
Who and what is such a man who thus dares to disturb our 
peace and make of our world a shamble? He must be 
deprived of his power in the interest of all mankind. There 
can be no peace, there ought to be no peace, so long as such 
a man exists in the world. Mankind will be well repaid for 
all the horrors of this war if the end of the War sees the end 
of imperialism, so that from henceforth no imperial man and 
no imperial nation shall claim and exercise the right of rule 
in the earth. 

Nor will mankind in the future have aught to do with 
secret diplomacy. No body of men sitting behind closed 
doors shall decide the issues of war and peace. The people 
must be consulted in this, — which is to them a matter of 
life and death. The people do the fighting and the paying, 
and as a matter of justice the decision rests with them. 
When we think of America, during this period of stress 
and storm, held steadily in its course by the will of a man 
who but a while ago was a private citizen, and who will 
soon be a private citizen again, we see the vast superiority 
of the American democratic system over the imperial and 
semi-imperial systems of Europe. And this is a presage 
of the future, when the people of the world will consciously 
rule the world and by their common sense and justice put an 
end to that injustice, — political, industrial and social, — which 
is the efficient cause of international, class, and social struggles 
that destroy the peace and happiness of mankind. It is only 
by human justice that injustice can be driven from the world. 1 

1 This was written before the fiasco of the Conference at Paris. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 357 

Not only does this war stand condemned as cruel and 
unjust, but it is also seen to be the acme of human folly. 
What we behold in Europe to-day is a sight worthy of 
Bedlam ; only in a madhouse might we expect such scenes 
of blind fury and irrational destruction. These warring 
nations, in a fit of passion, are making havoc of their own 
prosperity; the things which should have been for their 
health have become to them an occasion of falling; that 
vast power over the forces of nature which is the gift of 
science to mankind is being used by the political rulers of 
the nations for the destruction of mankind. Just when 
humanity, by means of applied science, might have escaped 
from under the burden of poverty the race is, — by the stu- 
pendous folly of kings, emperors, and statesmen, — placed 
under new burdens beyond all that they or their fathers 
were able to bear. 

The destruction of wealth surpasses the destruction of 
life, and the labor of mankind in the warring countries is 
mortgaged for generations to come. Surely, unless hu- 
man reason is to abdicate in favor of the folly of fools, 
some saner method than that of cruel warfare will be, — 
indeed, must be, — devised by the purposeful intelligence of 
man for the settlement of questions at issue between people 
and people. 

The outcome of the present war can be nothing else 
than the organization of the world for the maintenance of 
the peace of the world. Outraged compassion, justice, and 
wisdom will demand such organization as a reparation for 
the past and a remedy for the future. The god in man 
must hold the beast in man in leash, and use the beast in 
the work and interest of the man. 

To accomplish this, each man and woman and child must 
recognize and assert the divinity that is within each. Too 
long has man sought for his god in the skies, and by 
prayer and supplication cried to him for help in time of 
need. As man could make nothing and do nothing with 
the forces of nature so long as he thought them in the 



358 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

keeping of the gods, so he can make nothing and do noth- 
ing with the forces of human nature so long as he thinks 
of them as divine only and not human. 

The saving forces of humanity are in and of humanity. 
Kindness, goodness, wisdom, are found nowhere, so far as 
our observation goes, except in human hearts. If they are 
the attributes of any god then that god has made the hu- 
man heart his dwelling-place. We have the highest au- 
thority for declaring that the body of man is the temple of 
the Holy Ghost, and his soul the dwelling-place of the 
Most High. And this Divine Presence is not the prerog- 
ative of any priest or of any king; it is the birthright of the 
lowly of heart ; it is as common and as useful as the grass 
of the field. 

Our quarrel with current theologies is not with their 
affirmations, but with their negations and limitations. When 
I am told that Jesus is the Son of God, I bow my head in 
reverent consent ; but when I am told that Jesus is the only 
Son of God, I lift my head in protest and protection of my 
own Divine sonship. I, too, am the son of God, not by 
legal adoption, but by spiritual generation. I do not, like 
Newman, look abroad in the world to see the face of 
God, nor do I look to see that face in the doctrines of any 
church. My own heart is my mirror in which I see the 
face of God revealed in its kindness, its goodness, and its 
wisdom. My human nature is not merely a reflection of, 
it is the Divine nature. In the mirror of my heart I see 
my own face as the face of God. When a pope says to 
me: "I am the Vicar of God on the earth," I do not deny 
his claim, I only offset it with my own : "If the Pope, in 
his place, is the Vicar of Christ and God, so am I in mine." 
Whoever I be and wherever I am 

I am set to do God's thinking, 

With Him to work and plan; 
From toil nor sorrow shrinking, 

As we build a soul for man. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 350 

Human nature has within itself the laws and forces of 
its own progress from lower to higher forms of life. By- 
means of these forces, in obedience to these laws, it has 
through much tribulation emerged from the bestial savagery 
of the cave into the comparatively human condition of the 
present time; it has abolished cannibalism and chattel 
slavery and child exposure ; it is abolishing industrial tyr- 
anny, the exploitation of labor, and the subjection of 
women. 

Humanity is not yet finished, it is still in the making, 
and its Maker is not any God sitting aloft, nor is it any 
emperor, king, or pope acting in the name and power of 
such God. It is Humanity that is making Humanity. 



CHAPTER LXIX 

The Service of God 

It is related of the Roman general Pompey that, on one 
of his military expeditions in the East, he occupied, tem- 
porarily, the City of Jerusalem. While there he visited 
the Temple, and in spite of the remonstrances of the priests, 
he pushed aside the veil and entered the Holy of Holies. 
The Roman was astonished beyond measure when he dis- 
covered that there was no statue nor image of any god 
in that sacred place ; and he inquired if the people of the 
Jews were a godless people ; he having always associated 
the existence of a god with the image of that god. If the 
Roman wished to pray to the god of war for victory, he 
sought out some temple of Mars, where the god sat in 
chiseled majesty to receive the adoration of his worshippers. 

This absence of a graven image in the Temple at Jerusa- 
lem was one of several reasons why the religion of the 
Jews was so great a scandal to the ancient world. There 
was a god in every temple except in the Temple at Jerus- 



360 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 



alem, which was godless; and this charge of godlessness 
passed from the city and the Temple to the people; so it 
came to pass that the most intensely religious people in 
the world lay under the charge of irreligion. 

The primitive Christians were condemned as Atheists, 
because they would not sacrifice of their flocks and their 
herds in the temple of the gods. Animal sacrifice was the 
prevalent mode of worship. So when the Christians ab- 
stained from this practice they offended the religious sensi- 
bilities of their times ; this offense being so serious that it 
brought down on them the wrath of the populace and the 
condemnation of the law. For four centuries the Chris- 
tians suffered persecution even unto death, because they 
would not worship in accordance with the custom of their 
day. 

Historic facts such as these are a warning to the thought- 
ful mind not to confound religious custom with religion 
itself. As well might one confuse the clothing of a man 
with the man himself. Man is, it is true, in the civilized 
world a clothed animal, and is never seen in public without 
his clothing; but strip a man of his garments, and he is 
none the less a man; nor does a man's body change its 
character with the changing fashion of his dress; whether 
he wear skirt or trousers, "A man's a man for a' that." 
What is true of a man is equally true of religion. Re- 
ligion as a principle of human nature survives all change 
of religious custom. Custom must change if religion is 
to grow with the growing life of man; the man cannot 
wear the jacket of a boy. To say of religion that it is un- 
changeable in its creeds and its customs is to pronounce it 
a religion of creeds and customs and not a religion of life. 
Creeds and customs appropriate to one stage of evolution 
are absurd and abhorrent to another. A modern man would 
not care to go to church with a cannibal and eat the flesh 
of a captive, whose heart was burning on a near-by altar 
as a tid-bit offered to the cannibal god. It would be shock- 
ing beyond measure to a religious woman of this age to 
attend divine worship in an ancient temple, — the smell 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 361 

of the blood and the burning flesh would make her sick. 
Religion will change its mode of manifestation because it 
must; it drops its wornout clothing, that it may reclothe 
itself in garments in keeping with its present estate. 

Religion in our day is changing its mode of expression 
as radically as it did when Jewish law forbade the making 
a graven image and the Christians abandoned the custom 
of animal sacrifice. To many minds it is an alarming fact 
that the people are ceasing to go to church; the abandon- 
ment of church-going as a religious duty being ascribed to 
the growing indifference of the people to religion itself, 
as if in forsaking the churches they are forsaking their God. 
Every device is used to bring back the wandering flock to 
the fold, and still the people stay away. 

This absenteeism is peculiar to our times. In the primi- 
tive ages the people ran to the church before the morning 
light; they went to church in the gloom of cemeteries and 
catacombs; they risked their lives because of their church 
attendance. There was no question then as to how to get 
the people to go to church; they flocked to it as do beg- 
gars to a feast. In the medieval period the people went to 
church because there was nowhere else for them to go. 
The church was their life, it was their market-place, their 
theatre, their social center, their only place of amusement; 
the customs of the church were the customs of the times, 
the beliefs of the church were the beliefs of the times. 
But, unfortunately for the church, it is conservative while 
the spirit of the people is progressive; therefore the reason 
why the people do not go to church is because the people 
have outgrown the churches. 

The creeds of the churches, Protestant and Catholic, have 
lost their hold on the intelligence of men and women. The 
words of the creeds of the Fourth Century have no meaning 
in the Twentieth Century; for they are not living words, 
they are but the dead symbols of a dead philosophy. No 
one to-day, outside of a theological school, — concerns him- 
self with the problems of substance and person, which so 
agitated the minds of the generations of Arius and Athan- 



362 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

asius, of Cyril and Nestorius. These questions that were 
eagerly canvassed in the streets and market-places of 
Alexandria and Antioch, now engage the languid interest of 
the seminarian; but these Greek creeds are all Greek to 
the man in the street. 

The Protestant creeds of the Seventeenth Century are 
as far removed from the modern ways of thinking as are 
the Catholic creeds of the Fourth Century. These creeds 
are seldom mentioned even in Protestant churches. The 
long dogmatic sermon of our fathers, expounding the doc- 
trine of Grace, is never heard by their children; such ser- 
mons are not acceptable to modern hearers. A clergy- 
man once said to me: 

"I hardly mention theology in my sermons; I do not 
think it good taste." 

The creeds are in evidence only at times of ordination, 
when candidates for the ministry must solemnly declare 
their implicit belief in doctrines, which from that day until 
the close of their ministry they are at liberty utterly to 
ignore, — a liberty which the majority gladly take. A Pro- 
testant minister preaches of anything and everything ex- 
cepting the doctrines of his church. It is quite evident that 
the creeds now survive only in the inherited prejudices of 
mankind; they are no longer reasoned beliefs; they are pre- 
served only by being hermetically sealed away from the 
influence of the intelligence. They disintegrate when they 
come in contact with historical research or are subjected 
to scientific analysis. 

And unfortunately for ecclesiastical Christianity, its creeds 
are its life. When it cannot preach its creeds it has noth- 
ing to preach. Men can get astronomy, geology, biology, 
ethics, and sociology better outside the church than in it,t^- 
and they stay outside to get them. 

Real religion in the present age is based upon knowledge 
rather than upon belief. Knowledge is not, as in the 
theological system, the bond-slave of belief, but belief is 
the handmaiden of knowledge. The religious man of to- 
day does not say with the Latin Father: "I believe ber 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 363 

cause I cannot understand"; the modern does not, as did 
the ancient and medieval man, allow his beliefs to run 
rampant, he subjects them to constant verification and re- 
argument; he is always seeking to transmute belief into 
knowledge, and if a belief is incapable of such transmuta- 
tion, the modern man lays it aside as being useless for the 
purposes of human life. 

The modern world differs from the ancient and medieval 
in holding belief thus in the service of knowledge. The 
ancient and medieval man was credulous in believing; the 
modern man is careful. It is this attitude of the modern 
mind that will make forever impossible any return to the 
creedal churches, either Catholic or Protestant. The 
stream of life and thought is not into but away from these 
venerable organizations ; there will doubtless be backward 
eddies into the ancient pools of belief, but the river flows 
down to the sea of modern thought. 

The modern spiritual architecture is classic not Gothic. 
As the Greek of old, the modern man knows his limitations. 
He does not aspire, but is lowly in his own mind, and builds 
his spiritual temple out of the thoughts he can fathom and 
out of the experiences of his every-day life. He never 
dreams that his temple includes God ; he is content if it 
does not exclude him. And like the Greek temple, his re- 
ligious system, based as it is in the solid earth of human 
experience and built out of the hewn stone of human knowl- 
edge, will stand as long as human experience and human 
knowledge shall endure. Every addition to human knowl- 
edge is an addition to this spiritual temple that man is 
building; only a religion based upon knowledge can be per- 
manent and catholic, for knowledge, which is acquired truth, 
is the same everywhere and always. Creeds, on the other 
hand, are opinions, and opinions change; creeds are opin- 
ions and opinions differ; therefore a creedal religion can 
be but temporary and local. In our day creedal religion 
is being displaced by the religion of knowledge. 

This change of base from belief to knowledge has made 
what is called the public worship of the church repugnant 



364 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

to the modern man. The prayers and praises of the church 
make no appeal to a soul that lives in the modern thought 
world. To such a soul the prayers of the church seem fu- 
tile, the praises of the church fatuous. Prayer is based upon 
the ancient belief that the mind of God is a different thing 
from the mind of nature, and that by persuasion the mind 
of God can be moved to interfere with and change the 
mind of nature. All prayer for outward blessing is vain; 
no one to-day prays seriously for rain or fair weather; no 
one in time of pestilence calls on the bishops and the priests 
to ask their God to stay the plague. The modern religious 
man takes his weather as it comes, shielding himself against 
its inclemencies by his own devices, and looks for the 
cause of his sickness, not in the wrath of some god, but 
in the presence of some microbe, which he rights not with 
prayer but with toxin. 

It has been suggested that the Catholic Church may sur- 
vive into the future by shedding its doctrine and its disci- 
pline and becoming nothing else but the vehicle of man's 
worship of the mystery of life. But without its doctrine 
and its discipline, the Catholic Church would not be the 
Catholic Church. Its life is bound up with the papal 
claims, and these claims have been rejected by the modern 
world. 

The English Church has greater possibilities of survival 
than the Church of Rome, for the reason that, by the prin- 
ciple of interpretation, it adapts its creeds to the changing 
thought of the world, while its clergy are men of the people 
and not rulers but leaders of the congregations. Priestly 
authority is asserted by High Churchmen, but it is a 
mere assertion, having no validity. The English Church 
has not only the advantage of intellectual liberty and free- 
dom from priestly dominion, it has the further advantage 
of using a living language in its public worship. The 
English Bible and Prayer Book have been invaluable aids 
in preserving the beauty and the purity of English speech 
against vulgar defilement. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 365 

But neither the Catholic nor the Anglican liturgies can, 
in their present form, express the thought and the feeling 
of the present age and the age to come. Both liturgies 
are too pessimistic, too servile: they represent humanity as 
depraved and helpless. The worship of the future will 
have in it the spirit of Goethe and Wordsworth, of Whit- 
man and Emerson, rather than the moods of the Psalms of 
the temple and the hymns of the church. The worship 
of the future will have a sober joyousness and unquench- 
able hopefulness, inspired by an enthusiasm for that Hu- 
manity which, no matter how often it has fallen by the way, 
has lifted itself up by its own inherent strength and pressed 
onward and upward into higher, nobler life. 

The worship of the churches must be purged of all 
flatteries and obsequiousness ; from this time forth man 
will respect his God by respecting himself; he will ac- 
knowledge that he is a worm, but he will also assert that 
he is a man, and as a man he will stand upright in the 
presence of his God. Man is God's workman, and he has 
risen to equality with his employer. If man needs God, 
no less does God need man; and so man sings his hymn 
of willing service: 



Is there a God out yonder 

Sore troubled and beset; 
Doth he in waters flounder, 

Is he faint, cold, and wet? 

Doth he call to me for aid 
Across the seas of doubt; 

Must I death's deep waters wade 
That I may help him out? 

Is there a God that needs me? 

Then let him tell me so 
When death from this flesh frees me, 

I'm his for weal or woe. 



366 THE WAYS OP THE GODS 

The attitude of modern religion toward the universe is 
one of intelligent appreciation, patient adaptation, and a 
willing subjection to its service. The present world is not 
so good to any man that he does not wish to make it 
better; he finds the world, as the gods have made it, not 
quite to his liking and he seeks its constant improvement. 

The revolution in thought and feeling, which is now 
changing radically the modes of religious expression, is ac- 
complishing its end by removing the activities of religion 
from the unknown to the known, from the future to the 
present. It does not pray to an absentee God ; it works 
with a present God. In the old religions man had to be 
transformed into the nature of God ; in the modern re- 
ligion God has to be transformed into the nature of man. 
He has not only to be in man, He has to become man; and 
it is only as He lives in Humanity that Humanity can live 
in Him. We say not: "Lo here! lo there!" for the Pres- 
ence of God is within us. Our Humanity is the only 
power that can save Humanity. 

Our quarrel with the creedal and priestly churches is that 
they do not help, they hinder the growth of human sym- 
pathy, which is the saving power of the world. The pres- 
ent frightful condition of Europe is owing, in a measure, 
to the hatreds engendered by hostile religious creeds. For 
centuries Catholics have preached hatred of Protestants 
and Protestants hatred of Catholics, making hatred not love 
the cohesive force of religion ; and as they are thus practiced 
in hatred, they have made themselves the easy tools of the 
animosities of nations and the antagonism of classes. 

Christianity, — which in the mind of Jesus was the re- 
ligion of sympathy, unlimited by race, or creed, or coun- 
try, — has become the established religion of racial, creedal, 
and national hatreds. Fear and hatred have become the 
very warp and woof of Christendom, which is burning up 
in the fires of a hatred that religion kindled centuries ago 
and is now powerless to extinguish. Christendom cannot 
survive the present calamity, which its lack of humanity 
has brought upon it; indeed, there is now no Christendom, 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 367 

only a struggling, righting mass of races, creeds, nation- 
alities, and classes, which have lost all love of their com- 
mon humanity in their religious, class, and race hatreds. 
The only hope for Europe and the world is that this vast 
social upheaval shall bring men face to face with their com- 
mon humanity, as the only source of their common safety. 

The intelligence of man has outgrown the old limita- 
tions. By the invention of the means of rapid transit 
and inter-communication, the world of man is now one 
world. The world has attained to world consciousness ; a 
world brain and nervous system has been evolved, which 
compels every one in the world to suffer the pain of the 
world. Human intelligence has extended the area of hu- 
man sympathy ; and human sympathy will, in due time, 
abolish the horrors of war as it has abolished the burning 
of witches. 

This religion of Humanity is not coming; it has come. 
Already it has released the human mind from bondage to 
external authority; it has unified the world in a common 
knowledge ; it is employing the religious energies of the 
soul in improving social conditions ; it is escaping the 
churches, to find its home in the streets of the city and the 
byways of the country; it is seeking to know the will of 
life, that it may do it. Christianity is a failure, because 
it abandoned the teachings of Jesus for the creeds and rule 
of the churches. Claiming Jesus as its Founder, it has 
come to hate what Jesus loved and to love what Jesus 
hated. Because of this, the spirit of Jesus has forsaken 
the churches and has made its home in the outside world. 
We are at the beginning of a new age born of a great 
sorrow. Institutionalism is giving place of Humanism. It 
is man as man who is to merge all races, religions, na- 
tions, and classes into one common humanity. Humanity 
is the whole of which these are the parts ; and the whole 
is always greater than any of the parts. 

World Opinion is the pope of the coming age, having 
in its keeping the faith and the morals of mankind. The 



368 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

common intelligence, the common righteousness, the com- 
mon sympathy will overrule all lesser intelligence, all 
minor morality, all narrower sympathy. 

The ministers of this religion are already in its active 
service. These ministers are physicians whose knowledge 
admits of no racial, national, or creedal limitations; they 
are the students of nature, whose discoveries are necessarily 
the common property of tb~ human mind ; they are inven- 
tors who, by their genius, make every man neighbor to 
every man and so make the law "Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself" of universal application ; they are 
that vast company of men and women who, without regard 
to racial, creedal, or national considerations, in prisons, in 
hospitals, in city slums, and lonely mountain regions, are 
doing what they can to make this poor world of ours a 
better world for man to live in. These all spend their lives 
directly in the service of man, and make no distinction 
in thought or action between the service of Man and the 
service of God, because to them the service of Man is 
the service of God, and the service of God is the service 
of Man. 



CHAPTER LXX 

The Day of Judgment 

It came to pass on the Sunday after the Feast of the 
Ascension, in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen, 
that I was present at the high celebration of the Holy Euch- 
arist in the Cathedral of All Saints in the City of Albany, 
New York. This Cathedral, — the creation of that princely 
prelate, William Crosswell Doane, of blessed memory, — is one 
of the few Gothic churches worthy of the name that have been 
built in modern times. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 369 

This Church is set upon a hill; its pinnacle command- 
ing a view of the city and of the country for miles 
about. Within, its choir will seat some two hundred persons, 
and its nave and aisles two thousand more. Its columns of 
hewn stone, extending from the western doorway to the choir 
steps, give to this interior a sublimity worthy of the house 
of God ; its high altar of purest marble is a fitting table upon 
which to offer the divine sacrifice of the Body and Blood. 

When I entered the church the choir of some fifty voices 
was already in its place ; the celebrant, vested in alb and em- 
broidered chasuble, with four attendant priests, was within 
the sanctuary ; the great function of the day was in course 
of celebration. But what impressed me as I stood in that 
church, on this lovely Sunday morning, was not the sensuous 
beauty of this act of worship but the absence of worshippers. 
I looked over the wide spaces of the building and I estimated 
that there were present about fifty men and one hundred and 
twenty women and children ; and even these few seemed to 
have little interest in what they were doing- I watched their 
faces and I did not see a gleam of glory there ; there was no 
divine light in their eyes; their listless attitude, the dullness of 
their expression made one wonder why they were there at all; 
one felt that this dull folk could not hold their God in high 
esteem ; they were so apathetic in his presence. 

At the proper place in the program the preacher went up 
into the pulpit to preach. He was a man in middle life, of 
medium height, clean shaven, full breasted, — a pleasant man 
to look upon. He evidently took himself seriously- His 
entrance into his pulpit was a matter of a great formality; a 
verger in black gown with mace in hand preceded him to the 
steps of the pulpit and made obeisance to him as he ascended 
to the high place from whence he was to speak to the people 
the Word of God. Before he addressed his congregation he 
turned and bowed to the altar and called upon the Holy Spirit 
of God to inspire his words with wisdom from on high. 

As this Sunday was in the octave of the Ascension, that 
event was naturally the theme of the preacher's sermon. He 
proceeded, in all seriousness, to tell us, his hearers, that the 



370 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

Ascension of Jesus into the heavens was an outward event in 
the history of mankind. He said that on a certain day and at 
a certain place, a man called Jesus, who had been dead and 
was buried, but who had arisen from the dead and had come 
out of his grave, before the eyes of many witnesses, — his 
human body intact; compact of flesh and blood and bones, — 
did, of his own volition, rise slowly from the earth into the 
sky, and, while the gazers watched, this body passed from 
their sight into a region that they called heaven- This story 
as the preacher told it interested neither him nor his hearers; 
the marvel of it did not give convincing power to his voice, 
nor did it stir the hearts of the congregation to astonishment 
and admiration. While he preached the people, as before, 
sat inattentive, not listening to the sermon but waiting for 
it to be done with ; and when it did come to an end there was 
a stir of relief in the little gathering. Then the preacher 
turned again to the altar and bowed, ascribed to God the wis- 
dom and the glory of his utterance, went down out of the 
pulpit, and was conducted by the verger to his place in the 
choir. 

In that moment of silence the drone of an aeroplane was 
heard in the air, and all the people sat up and listened, — their 
faces alive with interest in a living event. As I came out of 
the Church into the open and saw three aeroplanes going up 
and up into the sky until they were lost to sight behind the 
clouds in the upper cirrus, and as I saw all the streets full of 
people, standing at gaze, I said to myself: 

'Alas ! poor preacher, the miracles of your Church are out- 
classed by the miracles of science. What you said could 
happen only once, and that to your God, now happens every 
day, — and that to common men-" 

There is nothing in all the history of religion that is more 
conclusive of the thesis that religious beliefs are the product 
of economic conditions than this story of the Ascension of 
Jesus with its consequent doctrine of his second coming. It 
has been said, and truly, that without a belief in the resur- 
rection of Jesus there would have been no Christianity. The 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 371 

resurrection of itself, however, would have been without re- 
sult; it was the belief in the resurrection, the ascension, and 
the return of Jesus that became the creative cause of Christen- 
dom. And of these three beliefs the last was by far the most 
important factor in bringing Christendom into existence and 
in making the history of the Western world. 

The preaching of Jesus when he was yet alive was revolu- 
tionary. It raised in the hearts of the mass of the people 
who heard him a hope for better things- His words promised 
bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the 
naked, shelter to the homeless, health to the sick, and free- 
dom to the slave and the prisoner. It was an economic change 
that Jesus preached. He came to restore the Kingdom to 
Israel ; to do over again the work of Joshua, whose name he 
bore ; to drive out the oppressor ; to redistribute the land ; to 
cancel all debts ; to bring in that condition of economic equal- 
ity which had been written in the constitution of his people 
in the name of their great law-giver Moses. 

The death of Jesus would naturally have put an end to this 
hope of his disciples, had he not risen up in the heart of 
Peter and inspired this great follower with the conviction 
that the Master had come again from the dead, and that the 
revolution which he preached was not abandoned, only post- 
poned ; that he who had gone away into heaven would come 
again with glory to judge the world in righteousness, to put 
down the mighty from their seat and to exalt the humble 
and meek, to fill the hungry with good things and to send the 
rich empty away. Peter called together the scattered fol- 
lowers of the crucified Jesus, inspired them with this new 
hope, and so inaugurated the greatest religious movement in 
the history of mankind. The Christian Church crystallized 
around this belief in the Second Coming of Jesus, with all 
the economic and political changes which that coming prom- 
ised. 

The condition of the Roman world gave a ready welcome 
to this doctrine. That vast, seething mass of hopeless pov- 
erty which, as a quagmire, was engulfing that ancient civiliza- 



372 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

tion was given pause by the energy of this new force. The 
Christian Church gave practical expression to the doctrine 
that it preached. Within the Church the slave was the equal 
of his master and the poor sat at the table of the rich. 

We cannot penetrate at all into the secret of the success of 
early Christianity unless we understand the doctrine of the 
Communion of Saints- The primitive church was a com- 
munity, the basis of which was economic equality; its prin- 
ciple was from every man according to his ability, to every 
man according to his need. The belief in the speedy second 
coming of Jesus, bringing to an end as it would this present 
world, deprived all worldly possessions of essential value, 
so that men who had houses and lands sold them and laid the 
price at the apostles' feet. And that which was first an en- 
thusiasm became a habit and unworldiiness was the badge of 
the Christian; the ambition for place and power and earthly 
wealth, which was the passion of the men of this world, was 
abomination to the Christian. 

Private wealth in its most virulent form, consisting as it 
did of private ownership, by enslavement of the working 
class, carried on implacable warfare against this common- 
wealth. But in spite of persecutions the Christian community 
increased in numbers, in wealth, in moral and spiritual power, 
until private wealth was compelled to compromise with it and 
give to the religion of Christ first a place, then the chief place, 
and finally the exclusive place in the religious life of the 
Roman Empire. 

The result of this triumph of Christianity was the loss of 
its distinctive institution- The world became Christian only 
on condition that the church should become worldly. The 
little self-governing communities of Christian folk were 
merged into the vast imperial church ; the bishops became 
prelates and popes, and sat beside the princes and the 
emperors. The distinction between the Church and the 
world was obliterated, and these two were of one mind as 
to the desirability of earthly pomp, power, and riches. This 
state of affairs caused the more ardent Christians, those who 
still held to the teachings of Jesus, to abandon both the world 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 373 

and the secular Church ; and fleeing to the desert and the 
wilderness, they hid themselves in caves, they embraced pov- 
erty as a bride, and would none other. 

The outcome of this movement was the monastic system. 
These anchorites formed little communities, in which there 
was absolute economic equality- Organized by Saint Benedict 
of Nursia, the monastic system spread all over Europe, and 
was the salvation of the Western world. In the midst of the 
wars that never ceased, the monastery was unprotected and at 
peace; its gate was open; it knew no foes; it succored, with 
equal charity, the Swabian and the Frank : the monk could 
among armed men walk freely, protected by his sanctity, 
poverty and his charity. As a consequence, out of these co- 
operative communities came the rulers of the world. The 
monastery gave its bishops and popes to the Church and its 
teachers and statesmen to the nations. But the government 
of the world was a side issue with these holy men : their real 
business was to watch and wait and pray for the Coming of 
the Lord. 

The belief in the Second Coming of Jesus reached its high- 
est pitch of intensity, — after the first enthusiasm had passed 
away, — in the year one thousand. Man has always been 
under the spell of numbers, and this year one thousand 
aroused feelings of awe and expectation. The state of 
Europe was one of poverty and ignorance that made the pre- 
sent a horror and the future a fear. Thoughtful men natur- 
ally despaired of this world : its ending seemed the only way 
out of its misery ; and as the year nine hundred and ninety 
nine passed away hysteria took possession of all Europe, and 
the dawn of the new Century saw multitudes of men and 
women forsaking wife and husband, children and friends, 
lands and houses, and fleeing to the monasteries to prepare 
for the Coming of the Lord. The year one thousand came 
and went, — and the Lord did not come. 

But what did come was a new world. The belief that the 
Coming of Jesus was the safety of the world inspired men 
with a desire to make the world a decent place for Jesus to 



874 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

come to. The monastery, absorbing as it did the best men 
and women of the race, became the source of order and 
culture to the world. 

The next two centuries were the golden centuries of 
Western Christendom. The belief in the Second Coming of 
Jesus inspired men to build in his name, and in the name of 
his Virgin mother, shrines of impressive beauty and sublim- 
ity t — and to create the greatest order of architecture, save 
one, that man has ever used in building the houses of his gods. 
This enthusiasm inspired an hymnody unsurpassed in sacred 
song. The "Dies Irae" and ''Jerusalem the Golden" were 
sung by pilgrims as they went from saintly shrine to saintly 
shrine, seeking the intercession of the saint to save them from 
the wrath of God on the day of his coming. 

The outcome of this concentration of human energy in the 
monastery was the acquisition by the monastery of political 
power and material riches. At the end of the Thirteenth 
Century the monks not only ruled Europe, they owned it. 
One-third of the land of Europe was in their possession and 
one-third of the labor. Riches and power corrupted the 
monastery as they had corrupted the Primitive Church, and 
in the first three years of the Fifteenth Century the monastic 
system went down with a crash. 

The modern era may be roughly dated from the year 1403, 
— when Boniface VIII excommunicated Philip IV of France, 
and Philip defied the Pope. In this quarrel the Papacy was 
routed and the age of pietism came to an end- The 
monasteries were given over to the spoliations of the young- 
er sons of the nobility The more intelligent of the clergy 
threw their missals into the discard, abandoned the reading 
of St- Thomas, and gave themselves to the watching of the 
heavens, — not for the Second Coming of Jesus, but to note 
the movements of the heavenly bodies which were there 
and always had been there. The priests, the popes, and the 
princes, leaving the nuns and the rustics to watch for the 
coming of Jesus, took vengeance on their past austerities by 
plunging into every excess of sensual indulgence; they 
sought the woods not to shun but to embrace the satyrs. This 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 375 

present world laughed and jeered and danced the heavenly 
world out of existence. Man's life lay not in the denial but 
in the enjoyment of his desires, to eat and drink and love and 
fight was the highest aspiration of that age. 

The revival of religion consequent upon the Protestant 
Reformation brought back a belief in the Second Coming of 
Jesus- But the purpose of that coming was not, as in prim- 
itive and medieval theology, to restore the Kingdom to the 
spiritual Israel. It had nothing to do with the social order; 
Jesus came not to inaugurate a revolution but to hold a court. 
He was to sit in the seat of judgment, and all the living were 
to stand before him and all the dead of all the ages were to 
come from their graves naked and shivering, like felons from 
their cells, to hear their doom. One by one, as their names 
were called, they were to stand at the bar and receive their 
sentence. According to the Calvinistic theory, their fate 
had been determined long before they appeared in this open 
court- God himself in his absolute sovereignty had pre- 
determined the destiny of each individual soul, electing some 
to salvation and some to damnation, and that his judgment 
might be justified, he caused the sinner to sin, and gave his 
righteousness to the righteous. 

This grotesque belief in the Day of Judgment that pre- 
vailed in the Seventeenth Century was dissolved by the ra- 
tionalism of the Eighteenth Century and was finally made 
forever impossible by the conception of the universe that 
mastered the minds of thinking men and women in the 
Nineteenth Century. 

With spasmodic revivals, the belief in the Second Coming 
of Jesus has ceased to be an active belief in the churches, it 
now serves as the distinctive doctrine of an obscure sect 
called the Adventists, the great body of Christian people 
holding it simply as a survival. The preacher in All Saints 
Cathedral did not believe it; his hearers did not believe it. In 
fact, a devout person shrinks with a sort of horror from the 
thought of the coming of Jesus at the present time after the 
conception of the primitive and medieval church. Think of 
the headlines in the morning newspapers announcing his de- 



376 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

scent upon the Mount of Olives, of the interviews to which 
he would be subjected by the modern reporter, of his dese- 
cration to the base uses of the moving picture, and be thank- 
ful that he must still abide in his secret place! 

And why should he come? Has he not suffered enough? 
Must he be dragged forth to look upon the failure of his mis- 
sion and the ruin of Christendom 3 On that day in 1914 when 
the nations of Christendom rose up in fratricidal strife, and 
called in the heathen from Asia and Africa to aid them in 
their mutual slaughter, the Christian era came to its end, and 
Christendom ceased to exist. A new era dates from that day ; 
a new world is emerging from that conflict. 

Christendom was the product of economic, social, political, 
and emotional forces working in the Mediterranean Basin 
from the Tenth Century B. C. to the Fifteenth Century A. D. 
During that period the shores of the Middle Sea were the 
seat of Western civilization. In the earlier period of this era, 
Tyre, at the extreme East, was the center of commercial ex- 
changes; at a later period this center moved west to Carthage; 
in the Roman period, to Alexandria; in the medieval 
period Venice was the center of commercial exchanges and 
the Lombards the bankers of Europe. Christianity is the 
religion which was the final outcome of the creative forces of 
that world. It derives its religious element from Judea, its 
theology from Greece, and its political organization from 
Rome. This religion has as its characteristics the exclusive- 
ness of Judaism, the intellectual subtlety of Greece, and the 
political tyranny of Rome. 

After the downfall of the Roman empire Europe was uni- 
fied by this religion. The barbarian from the North fell 
under the spell of the people whom he conquered. This union 
of the energetic mind of the Teuton with the subtle intel- 
ligence of the Latin gave being to modern civilization; the 
expanding forces of that civilization are Teutonic ; the 
molding forces are Latin. During the early formative period 
of this era the Latin element cast the Germanic mind in its 
religious mold. This religion took over from Judaism its 
exclusiveness. The Christian God was the only God; the 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 377 

Christian religion the only religion. All outside the pale of 
Christianity were infidels, and by that circumstance subject 
to the wrath of God- When a Christian met a heathen he 
either converted him or told him to go to hell. The conse- 
quence was a Christendom separated from the rest of man- 
kind not so much by social and political as by religious 
barriers. 

The thought of Christendom was unified by a system of 
dogma that was the product of the Greek mind. The Geek 
mind was short on observation and long on definition- The 
Greek evolved a beautiful language, and then fell in love with 
his words. Always on the verge of great discoveries, he lost 
himself in the maze of his definitions. The religion of Jesus 
was a way of life to Jesus ; under the influence of the Greek 
mind it became a mode of thought, — the energy of the church 
for four centuries being expended in an effort not to serve 
God but to define him. 

The religious exclusiveness of the Hebrew and the in- 
tellectual definition of the Greek were organized into a 
political system by the Roman lawyers for the government 
of the Western world- This completed the unification of 
Christendom. There was one God, one Creed, one Church, 
and this was the God, the Creed, and the Church of the Medi- 
terranean Basin. Rome was its political and religious capital, 
Florence its intellectual center, and Venice the center of its 
commercial exchanges. 

This unity received its first vicious blow not, as one might 
expect, from the fulminations of an heretic, but from the for- 
tuitous voyage of a sailor. Christopher Columbus, a devout 
Catholic, sailed westward and discovered a new continent. 
One of the consequences of that discovery was the loss of 
Christian unity. Vasco Da Gama, inspired by the voyage of 
Columbus, circumnavigated the Continent of Africa, and op- 
ened a water way to Bombay, the immediate effect of which 
was to transfer the center of commercial exchanges from 
Venice to Lisbon. This center passed on from Lisbon to 
Amsterdam and from Amsterdam to London- The Mediter- 
ranean Basin was no longer the highway of commerce. This 



378 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

change of the center of exchanges was followed by political 
and religious upheavals. The north of Europe renounced 
its dependence on the South. The so-called Protestant Re- 
formation was the chief consequence of this revolution. 

Christendom was divided into two hostile sections, Catholic 
and Protestant and the Protestant section into a dozen war- 
ring sects. Each of these divisions and sects carried over 
from the parent body its whole equipment of Judaic exclusive- 
ness, Greek subtlety, and Roman tyranny; and each section 
set about the colossal task not only of converting all the 
heathen but of converting as well the members of all other 
churches and sects- In neither enterprise has any of these 
churches or sects been eminently successful. 

This division of Christendom was exceedingly favorable to 
freedom of thought in Europe, and the scientific movement 
gained a headway that enabled it to free itself from ecclesi- 
astical control. In this universe of science there is no place 
for any throne of God, no seat for his government. What- 
ever God there be is everywhere or nowhere. It is the thought 
of science that has made unbelievable the creed of the Church- 
It was because the preacher and the people in All Saints 
Cathedral were subconsciously possessed by the scientific 
mind that they were not interested in the story of Jesus' Ascen- 
sion and gave to his second coming no second thought. 

The human mind no longer occupies itself with Church 
dogma ; it is eagerly engaged in the pursuit of scientific truth. 
Withdrawing itself from the ecclesiastical control, it has gone 
on from acquisition to acquisition, until it has come to have 
a w r ell-rounded conception of the universe in which it finds 
itself. This conception is based not on any divine revelation 
but upon human investigation and reasoning. During the 
scientific era knowledge has been secularized. Christian 
dogma is the exclusive possession of the Christian Church ; 
scientific knowledge is the common property of all mankind. 
It depends for its validity not upon the decree of any pope 
or council, but upon the affirmation of the human intelligence. 
Nothing is true for the mind of man which the mind of man 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 379 

may not verify. It were absurd to call this system of know- 
ledge "Christian-" Science has destroyed the foundations of 
Christian dogma, and so far as knowledge is concerned 
Christendom has ceased to exist. 

With the secularization of knowledge has gone the secular- 
ization of art and recreation. Christian art occupied as it 
was with the Christian mythos, has passed away with that 
mythos. Architects to-day are not engaged in the building 
of Cathedrals, nor are the artists painting the pictures of 
Virgin and Saints. The architect is busy with the problem 
of the office, the warehouse, the factory, the theater, and 
the public hall- The artist finds his inspiration not in the 
dreams of the Church but in the direct vision of nature. He 
pictures the dawn and the setting sun as his eye sees them ; 
the models he uses are neither the anchorites of the cell nor 
the nun of the cloister but the peasant in the field, the woman 
in the home, and children playing in the streets. Modern art 
is in no sense Christian : it is natural, unsectarian, and interna- 
tional. The bold execution of the West wins the admiration 
of the East and the delicate handling of the East charms the 
imagination of the West- Christian art has had its day. We 
preserve its treasures, but its divinities no longer inspire the 
artist. The only God whom the artist worships is the God 
of Beauty whose presence is seen in every land and on every 
sea. 

During the primitive and medieval periods Christian peo- 
ple found their recreation in the Christian Church. In the 
earlier period the slave escaped from the dreariness of his 
drudgery to recreate his soul in the vital air of the Christian 
community; his soul was stirred from its sluggishness by the 
eloquence of the preacher and was swept along on the song of 
the congregation. In medieval times the church was the 
place of common amusement- Not only were the pageants 
of the church the entertainment of the masses, but the clergy 
as actors gave theatrical performances to delight the people. 
The miracle plays of the Church are the source of modern 
drama. The Protestant Reformation put an end to all this, 
and in London and elsewhere the actors were driven from 



380 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

the precincts of the cathedrals to take refuge in such places 
as the Bankside, — where harlots and thieves had their haunts, 
— and in such rich soil was grown the greatest dramatic 
genius the world has ever known. Since the days of Shake- 
speare the theater has been of the world, worldly, and the 
Church has feared and hated it as its deadly enemy. As a 
consequence, all recreation has been secularized ; Gods and 
angels no longer occupy the stage : it is to study the passions 
of men and women that men and women resort to the theater. 

The Catholic Church stills holds the people by the splendor 
of its ceremonies and the charm of its music ; but the appeal 
to the senses alone cannot mould the life. It is only when the 
intelligence justifies the senses that the soul can be stirred 
to fear or to admiration. The ceremonies of the Catholic 
Church have lost their power to hold the intelligence because 
they have lost their reality; the world that they picture has 
passed away and they cannot compete to-day with the moving 
picture, with its crude representations of the crude realities 
of the world as it is. 

But the greatest disaster that has befallen Christendom is 
the secularization of the revolution. The primitive and 
monastic church preached, sang, and practiced the revolu- 
tion- Its gospel was good news to the poor. It lifted the 
beggar from the dunghill and sat him with the princes of the 
people ; its aristocracy was an aristocracy of merit ; it abol- 
ished the tyranny of property ; it gave to the lowest of man- 
kind the priceless gift of personal dignity ; it promised men 
redemption from poverty here and now, and what it promised, 
to the extent of its ability, it gave. In the primitive church 
and in the monastery no man was allowed to say that aught 
of the things that he possessed was his own but they had all 
things in common. But modern Christianity has no such 
doctrine. Since the Reformation the churches have been 
saying to the people : 

"If you will be good and order yourself lowly and rever- 
ently to all your betters ; if you will consent to go hungry 
and thirsty, naked and houseless, languish in sickness and 
in prison in this life, then we promise you in abundance 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 381 

heavenly manna, the water of life, white robes, palms, and 
crowns, the company of God and angels, after you are dead." 

The economic equality which is denied men on earth is 
lavished upon them in heaven- In this way religious sanction 
has been given by priests and preachers of the Christian 
Church to the most iniquitous system of economic exploita- 
tion that has ever existed among men. Because of this, the 
preaching of the revolutionary gospel of Jesus has been taken 
from the Christian clergy and given to the outcast people 
themselves. Not the British clergy but the British Labor 
Party has formulated the program for the reconstruction of 
the world. That vast, involuntary, unnecessary poverty that 
the modern industrial system has produced, that modern 
Christian governments have legalized and modern Christian 
churches justified, has renounced Christianity; it knows no 
creed ; it only knows its own misery ; it is rising everywhere 
to abolish its poverty or to wreck the world. It can wait no 
longer for the second coming of Jesus. For the revolution 
Christendom has no existence. Humanity is coming to the 
rescue of Humanity. 

With the passing of the belief in the Second Coming of 
Jesus, goes the whole structure of Christian theology, the 
paraphernalia of Christian worship, and the right of the 
Christian clergy to the teaching office. Out of this wreck- 
age there is only one salvage, and that is the Humanity 
of Jesus. And it is this Humanity of Jesus that has judged 
the Christian Church, the Christian nations, the Christian 
industrial methods, and condemned them- Jesus gave the of- 
fice of Judge on the Day of Judgment not to any God or to 
any Son of God but to the Son of Man. It is Humanity that 
is the final judge of all that relates to the life of Humanity. 
All institutions, — religious, political, social, and industrial, — 
are on trial in this Court of Humanity. Humanity creates such 
institutions; and so long as they serve the well-being of the 
race, Humanity permits them to stand. When they fail 
utterly to be useful, Humanity throws them aside and creates 
new machinery to carry on its work. All institutions are 
subject to the law of growth and decay: When they have 



382 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

grown old and useless they cumber the ground and then the 
axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the tree that beareth 
not good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. 

The weakness of the Christian Church is largely the fault 
of its age. The Roman Catholic Church is a survival in the 
modern world of the Roman Empire. It uses the Latin 
language ; its priests are dressed in the fashion of the Roman 
gentleman of the Third Century ; it thinks as the Romans 
thought when they were still the imperial race. But all this 
has passed away never to return. The Latin language is dead 
and in process of burial ; the fashions of the Third Century 
are passe, and imperialism is no longer in favor with the peo- 
ple. A great war has just been fought to put an end to it. 

The Protestant churches are not so old as the Latin Church, 
but they have less vitality. They are the representatives of 
European nationalisms and modern class distinctions. They 
are provincial, and can make no universal appeal to mankind- 
A divided, discordant Christendom cannot hope to convert 
the world. It must be clear to every man of vision that the 
mission of the Christian Church to the heathen world is a 
failure. The great masses of non-Christian people can never 
now be converted to Christianity ; nor can the Catholic Church 
be reconciled with Protestantism ; nor the various Protestant 
bodies be unified; nor will the vast mass of unchurched people 
ever return to the Church. The Church is the product of 
spent forces. Humanity, which existed for ages before the 
Christian era and will continue to exist for ages to come, — 
now that the Christian era has passed into history, — is en- 
gaged in building for the future- The world is in revolution : 
institutions which had their origin in later barbarism and early 
civilization are falling into ruin; the family, in which civiliza- 
tion had its origin, is in process of dissolution. The liberation 
&nd emancipation of woman has destroyed that dominance 
of the male which was the cornerstone of the ancient family. 
Woman now does not belong to any man, — not to her father, 
still less to her husband ; she owns herself, and is an integral 
element in the body politic. 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 383 

The rise of the working class from the condition of serv- 
itude, which has been its lot from the beginning of human 
industry to the present age, has changed the structure of 
society ; the relation of master and slave no longer exists ; 
the slaves have not only secured their own freedom, but are 
taking over the political control of the world. 

Europe has lost the political, intellectual, and religious 
leadership of mankind, and is now dependent on America and 
Asia. The center of exchanges is shifting from London to New 
York. Competition is giving place to cooperation. The 
great war just ended has shaken the old civilization from its 
foundations and made necessary the rebuilding of society. 

The Christian religion, with its Judaic exclusiveness, its 
Greek subtlety, and its Roman tyranny, is inadequate to the 
spiritual necessities of the present age and the age to come. 
"Creation !" is the watchword of the old time, "Evolution !" 
of the new. God is no longer on his Throne, he is in his 
workshop. He is incarnate not only in Jesus of Nazareth but 
in every creature that creeps and crawls and walks upon the 
earth. The universe is ruled not by power external to itself 
but by power within itself, the force that holds it together 
lies not in the mighty sun but in the minute atom. It is this 
sovereignty of the atom that is transforming the political, 
industrial, and the social world. It is the coming to con- 
sciousness of the human atoms that has caused the downfall 
of the ancient order and is to build up the new- The peace 
and prosperity of mankind is no longer in the power of gov- 
ernments ; it has come into the control of the people. 

Certain elderly gentlemen of the old order, not aware of 
this change, have been busy in Paris trying to restore the 
Humpty-Dumpty of nationalism to its place on the wall. They 
have made a peace, which is no peace, and a League of Na- 
tions that leaves the nations as they are each with its naval 
and military establishment, to impoverish an already im- 
poverished people. The motive of this peace is Vae Victis. 
New wars lurk in it- Bleeding Europe may hardly staunch 
her wounds before she must bleed again. 



384 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

But the future is not within the keeping of these politic- 
ians; their treaties and their League of Nations are but the 
last gasps of the Old Order. A new era, which does not 
know these politicians, is at hand. Emerson speaking of 
civilization said : "We are not at its meridian but only at the 
cock-crowing and the morning star." A cosmic hour has 
passed since then, and our Eastern skies are reddening with 
the angry dawn of the new day. It is not in the West that 
the sun rises but in the East. It behooves the watchman to 
fix his gaze not on Paris but on Pekin and Moscow. 

In this new day that is dawning there will be work for 
every man, woman and child. We must restore the waste 
places and build up the tabernacles of the gods that have 
broken down. We will have to recover our sense of the divine 
in nature. Cardinal Newman said that if we had faith we 
might see an angel of God in every flower; and that was the 
faith possessed by every pagan boy and girl ; they were 
taught to see a divinity in every blooming bush, to feel it in 
every blowing wind, and to hear it in the music of running 
water. These Gods of old, compounded as they are of sun- 
light and the rain, have lost for us their divinity in their 
commonness. Because the sunlight falls with equal blessing 
upon the high and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the evil 
and the good, and because the rain is raining somewhere 
every day, these are but sunlight and rain to us and form the 
theme of our daily complaining. We say of the sunlight that 
it is hot and glaring, and of the rain that it is cold and wet; 
and we never worship these (as our pagan fathers did) as 
the embodiment of the Living Force which gives to us our 
life. 

And we must proceed from a recovered sense of the divin- 
ity of nature to restore our belief in the divinity of man. We 
have been taught to believe in the divinity of Christ; and was 
not Jesus, the son of Joseph, who was called Christ, a man; 
and if Jesus was divine, why not you or I? Too long have 
we suffered the Church to slander man, — to call him fallen 
and depraved. Man has stumbled, but he has never fallen- 
In pain and sorrow he has made his way up the steep ascents 



THE WAYS OF THE GODS 385 

of life from the amebae to the man. No God from without 
has helped him ; it is the God within him that has won the 
victory. 

It has been my lot for more than seventy years to live very 
close to the heart of humanity; and if any man says to me 
that that heart is deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked, I say such a man speaks evil of the good- It is not 
the wickedness but the essential goodness of the human heart 
that has been my wonder. That heart is often corrupted by 
riches and high place and power; it is often hurt by poverty 
and bad treatment, but that heart as a heart is sound to the 
core, and all the salvation that has ever come to man has 
come to him from the human heart. 

Because man is divine, his labor is sacred; his strength is 
as the strength of a God. It is this sacredness of human labor 
that condemns our present industrial system as sacrilege- 
Human labor is not something to buy and sell in the market, 
— to put to base uses in making gauds for women and intox- 
icants for man. No human labor can be wasted ; every exer- 
tion of it is needed to furnish forth the necessities of life. 
Every man, woman, and child in the world is entitled to a 
sufficiency of good food and pure water, to beautiful clothing 
and dignified shelter. Until these are supplied to all, any 
expenditure of labor on useless things is a sin against the 
sacredness of labor; and when these essentials are supplied, 
labor should cease and every man enjoy his leisure- 

In the new day man must recover the freedom of his soul 
and his intelligence ; the right to think and the right to the 
full expression of thought is not only essential to the well- 
being of the personal soul, it is a necessity of society ; without 
such freedom society stagnates and dies of its own impurities. 
Institutions are the foes of intellectual freedom, because free 
thought is the dissolvent of institutions. As Emerson has 
said : "When a thinker is born all things are at risk." It is 
the fatal error of the Church that it has tried to give per- 
manence and universality to creeds- But creeds are opinions, 
and opinions change; creeds are opinions, and opinions differ. 
Opinions are the clothing of the intelligence, and the man who 



386 THE WAYS OF THE GODS 

does not change his opinions is all one with the man who 
does not change his shirt. Such intellectual uncleanliness 
breeds the foul diseases of spiritual pride, fanaticism, bigotry, 
and intolerance. As for me, it has long been my habit to give my 
intelligence a bath every morning and to send my opinions to 
the wash once a week. 

And what shall we say more? Shall we speak of Death 
in the New Era and what is to come after Death? Not now. 
Death is every man's private business, and he may think of it 
as he will. He cannot avoid it, and when it comes it will 
solve its own problems. Let us discharge our minds of the 
thought that we cannot see whatever Gods there be until after 
we die. If we do not see these Divinities before that event, 
I trow we shall never see them at all. 



The Living Gods 



M 



THE LIVING GODS. 

en tell me that the Gods are dead, 

As leaves of yesteryear. 
From out their forms their souls are fled 

The skies weep o'er their bier. 

They tell me that Varuna's gone 

From out the midnight sky. 
His children stars all fruitless moan 

Within his arms to lie. 

They tell me that the Hours of Day 

No more can happy be. 
Since their God Chronos went away 

They are mere chronology. 

They tell me that the Steeds of Light, 
No more the darkness follow. 

No more they burst the bars of night 
Hard driven by Apollo. 

They even say at break of day 

Athena cannot come. 
Her mist like form, her breath of spray 

Is melted by the sun. 

They tell me Zeus no longer sits 

Enthroned among his fellows ; 
But round that throne the night wind flits 

And there the storm cloud bellows. 

They say Jehovah comes no more 

On social service bent, 
To sit cross-legged at the door 

Of good old Abram's tent. 



They say that Jesus Christ is dead, 
' And buried long ago. 
The race of man he has not saved, 
Nor healed a single woe. 

They say that Mary's radiant star 

No longer lights the sea. 
The iron laws of nature bar 

Her true virginity. 

They tell me all the Gods are dead; 

Not one of them is left. 
The very race itself is sped. 

Of Gods the earth's bereft. 

But let men tell me what they will, 

I know it is not true 
I know the Gods are with us still 

To them our love is due. 

I know the stars all com'fy lie 

Within Varuna's arms; 
He walks with them about the sky 

And still their wild alarms. 

I know the jocund Hours of Day 
Still dance from sheer delight, 

And turn their faces every way 
To keep their God in sight. 

I know Apollo's gallant steeds 
Still come at break of day. 

Upon the dark their swiftness feeds 
And eats the night away. 



I know that with the graying dawn 

Athena's cooling breath 
Brings healing to the fevered one 

And shuts the gates of death. 

I know that Zeus in heat of noon 
Seeks Leda's cloud cool bower 

And there dissolved in lover's swoon 
Pours down in golden shower. 

I know that when the skies are black 
With wraiths of monstrous form 

That fly before the wind wild wrack 
Jehovah rides the storm. 

I know that Jesus Christ is ris'n 
And is at Man's right hand, 

And there for every creature wiz'n 
As suppliant doth stand. 

I know that Mary's kindly light 

Still leads the sailor home. 
By nature 'tis the woman's right 

To rescue men that roam. 

Yes, yes, the Gods are all alive, 

Not one of them is dead. 
In faithful hearts they still do thrive 

In spite of all that's said. 

They are each the weaving of the ONE 
That knows nor wrong nor right, 

On whose eternal loom is run 
All Gods both dark and bright. 



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